Episode 88: Seoul Hiking-Trail Rape-Murder (신림동 등산로 성폭행 살인 사건)

Before dawn on January 20, 2009, a shipping container swung through the air above a street in central Seoul. It hung from a crane, and it was full of police commandos. They were headed for a makeshift tower on a rooftop where dozens of evicted shopkeepers and their supporters had barricaded themselves in. About an hour later, the tower was on fire. Six people would never come down from that roof: five protesters and one young police officer.

In January 2008, a fire tore through a cold-storage warehouse under construction in Icheon, just outside Seoul. Forty workers died. The company was fined 20 million won. Twelve years later, in the same city, another cold-storage warehouse under construction caught fire in almost exactly the same way. This time, 38 workers didn't make it out.

A hospital is supposed to be the safest place you can be when you're old and sick. On a freezing January morning in 2018, in a small city in southern Korea, it became one of the deadliest places in the country. Almost no one there was burned. They died of smoke, in beds, in hallways and in a stalled elevator. And some of them were still tied by one wrist to a bed rail when the smoke reached them.

On a cold Thursday afternoon four days before Christmas, women in a small city in central Korea were doing something completely ordinary. They were at the sauna. Some came with their mothers, some with their daughters. Within an hour, twenty people on that floor were dead. And outside, a few meters away behind a wall of glass, their families were on the phone with them, begging firefighters to break the windows.

A building is a promise. You walk in, you go to sleep, you cross a river on your way to school, and you trust that someone, somewhere, did the work to keep it standing.