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Families, friends struggle to cope after Seoul crush
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FILE - Mourners pay tribute for victims of a deadly accident following Saturday night's Halloween festivities at a joint memorial altar for victims at Seoul Plaza in Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 1, 2022. As bereaved families and friends struggle to make sense of a Halloween crowd crush that killed 156 people in South Korea’s capital, their grief is mixed with anger about officials’ failure to employ crowd controls in a small nightlife district jammed with tens of thousands of partiers. - photo by AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — As bereaved families and friends struggle to make sense of a Halloween crowd crush that killed 156 people in South Korea’s capital, their grief is mixed with anger about officials’ failure to employ crowd controls in a small nightlife district jammed with tens of thousands of partiers. Many expressed wrenching pain and deep frustration about what they saw as official ineptitude, including a failure by police to adequately respond to repeated emergency calls from people about the swelling crowd getting out of control hours before the crush occurred Saturday evening in a narrow alley near the Hamilton Hotel in the Itaewon entertainment district. Here are the stories of some of the grieving family members and friends.