Stay updated with breaking news from Stephen blessy. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
seoul with what has become a makeshift memorial there, ivan. are you learning any more about what triggered the surge? reporter: just a sheer mass of humanity. many, many young people, thousands of them that gathered steps from where i m standing right now to celebrate halloween, to drink, tricked out in costumes and it turned into a nightmare. i ll get out of the way so you can take look at this very somber, very sad scene here. people have been laying flowers and lighting candles, handwritten notes to some of the 154 mostly very young victims of this terrible catastrophe. i ve spoken with a number of the survivors, people who came out saturday night, they heard that this neighborhood, itaewon, just down the road from an old u.s. military base threw a good party on the weekend of halloween and were initially laughing at the just massive numbers of people in the nearby alleyways near where i m standing. and then those jokes about, hey, i m not going to be able to brea ....
reporter: the korean government has declared a week of mourning. most of the victims were in their 20s. the government says five her high school students, one was a middle school student. i ll point you here. this is a 20-year-old american exchange student, stephen blessy who was here on his junior semester abroad. junior year in college. just devastating. ivan, where does the investigation go from here? reporter: well, the police have come out, and they say that they simply didn t have a guidebook or a manual for a gathering of this kind without a single organizer. they had anticipated more people here as korea has come out of the covid lockdowns and regulations, they say they deployed more police officers than in past years for halloween, but that their mission was to focus on stopping drug use and sexual abuse, not ....