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Juliana Velandia Santaella snapped a photo of young women dressed as bananas, hot dogs and fries on the streets of Itaewon at 10:08 p.m. Saturday night. Then he decided to return home, going down a narrow alley where he would narrowly escape his death.
The 23-year-old medical student from Mexico began to feel crushed by the crowd, which slowly pushed hundreds of people down an alley that became the center of a crash that left at least 154 dead and 149 injured. Her injuries, which sent her to the emergency room and are still debilitating, show what can happen during a dangerous crowd crush.
Velandia was separated from her friend, 21-year-old Carolina Cano from Mexico, and began to feel the weight of other people’s bodies crushing her. “At some point, my feet weren’t touching the floor anymore,” he said. “There was an unconscious guy on top of me, which was affecting my breathing.”
Velandia focused on breathing shallowly through her mouth as her lungs began to feel like they were flattening. People around her screamed for help or called the police, she said, but then gradually fell silent as their bodies limped above and below her. Stuck in a crowd, she remembers that she could only move her neck freely while the rest of her body was restrained.
“I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to be next.’ I really thought I was going to die,” he said. “I was completely paralyzed. At some point, I couldn’t feel my legs. I couldn’t even move my toes.”
She was stuck like that, unable to feel parts of her body, until a young man standing on a raised ledge grabbed her by the arms and pulled her away from the crowd. He said he was able to look at his phone and saw that it was 10:57 p.m
After a few minutes, he began to regain feeling in his legs. Even then, “there were so many unconscious bodies on the floor that I couldn’t even walk,” he said.
He managed to get home, but on Sunday he developed a fever and spent four hours in the emergency room at St. Mary’s at the Catholic University of Korea, where he was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a life-threatening condition that affects the muscles. injuries and necrosis as the cells—in Velandia’s case, in the leg—begin to die. Muscle tissue releases proteins and electrolytes into the blood and can damage the heart or kidneys or lead to permanent disability or death. On Friday, doctors will check his kidneys for damage. Speaking from her bedroom on Monday, she said the pain has gotten worse. One leg is swollen and purple, and he can’t put his whole foot on the ground while walking.
Even now, his chest hurts if he breathes too deeply.
Ali Asgary, a disaster and emergency management expert at York University in Canada, said crowd disasters “are one of the most complicated and least understood events.”
“Injuries and fatalities in these situations can be caused by a combination of factors working together,” he said in an email. These factors include the density of people, the strength of the walls, whether the floor is uneven or the narrowness of the space, he added.
This is what causes crowd crushes like the deadly one in Seoul
Other safety experts have reported restrictive asphyxiation, head trauma, and rib fractures as possible causes of injury or death in crowd crush cases. And the difficulty that authorities often have in evacuating the injured or providing rapid medical care can make matters worse, according to Rohini Haar, an emergency physician who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health. “Unfortunately, once a crush starts, it’s hard to stop.”
According to Velandia, many people were trying to move the bodies to clearer ground to perform CPR as he escaped the crowd Saturday afternoon. Some people who appeared lifeless had vomit in and around their mouths, suggesting they had drowned, he said.
She found her friend, Cano, who had borrowed a stranger’s cell phone to call her. The two met in front of Itaewon Station, the place where so many revelers had started their Halloween night.
“We hugged and cried a lot when we saw each other, because we really thought the other was dead,” Velandia said. “It’s a miracle we’re alive, really.”