“I texted him, I guess it was like an hour or so before this tragedy happened, saying, ‘I know you're out and about, but I love you. Be careful. Be safe.’ That was the last text between us. There was no response,” Steve Blesi tells Inside Edition.
The father of an American college student killed in the Halloween crowd surge in Seoul, South Korea, is speaking out to Inside Edition.
Steve Blesi’s son Steven, a 20-year-old college student from Georgia, was visiting the country on a study abroad program.
“I texted him, I guess it was like an hour or so before this tragedy happened, saying, ‘I know you're out and about, but I love you. Be careful. Be safe.’ That was the last text between us. There was no response,” Steve Blesi said.
Hours later, Steve learned his son was one of 155 people crushed to death in the disaster in the capital city's nightclub district. He says he's haunted by the manner of his son's death.
“It’s not an easy way to go. It’s a horrible way to go. It’s like drowning, but above water,” Steve said.
Anne Marie Gieske was the other American student killed in the tragedy. She was a student at the University of Kentucky and had just celebrated her 20th birthday. She was the niece of Congressman Brad Wenstrup of Ohio, who called her "a gift from God to our family."
An estimated 100,000 revelers in Halloween costumes were packed into the narrow streets, and only 137 police officers were deployed to control the crowd. The disaster happened in a densely-packed alley just 14-feet wide.
Dr. Sophia Akhiyat, a dermatologist from Florida, was vacationing in Seoul. She shot video just before the crush and says she left, because it was too crowded. When she returned an hour later, she found a nightmarish scene.
“I just did the best I could with both giving CPR and directing it, but we realized that many of these people had actually died already,” Akhiyat said.
Crowd safety expert Paul Wertheimer tells Inside Edition one of the most important things you can do if faced with a crowd surge is to get into a boxer’s stance with your feet apart and arms in front of your chest in order to make space between the person in front of you. He also advises not to yell and scream in order to conserve oxygen.
A crowd surge, or crowd crush, is a powerful and sudden movement some would liken to the sensation of being moved by waves or the ocean tide. It occurs when too many people are packed closely in a confined xpace and something causes the crowd to shift or move, sometimes in the form of someone falling down, or in other instances, pushing from the back of a crowd toward the front. When a crowd surge or crush occurs, people are pushing into each other from various points, making it hard to breathe because people need space for their lungs to expand.
It takes about six minutes to go into compressive or restrictive asphyxia, which is the probable cause of death for people who die in crowd crush, G. Keith Still, a crowd safety expert and visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England, told The Washington Post.
People die standing and those who fall in the chaos can also be killed because the bodies on top of them exert pressure that can make breathing impossible.
“As people struggle to get up, arms and legs get twisted together. Blood supply starts to be reduced to the brain,” Still told NPR last year after a crowd surge at Astroworld killed 10 people.
The street festival in South Korea was especially crowded, because it was the first Halloween event in three years after COVID-19 lockdowns.
