How did shopping at this mall lead to the d.e.a.t.h.s of 502 people?
June 29th, 1995, 2 p.m. So District, Soul, South Korea. The Sampong Department Store was by any measure having a good day. 40,000 shoppers moved through its five floors. Families drifted between clothing racks. Teenagers crowded the food court. Children pressed their hands against the glass display cases near the entrance.
Unbeknownst to them, up above on the fifth floor, the mall’s top executives were having a meeting to decide their fate. The suit sat around a table at one of the management offices. Chairman Lee Jun and his son, the store’s president, were presiding over the meeting. The building’s cooling systems had been switched off roughly an hour earlier, and the hot air in the room had gone completely still.
Spread across the table in front of them were maintenance logs, photographs, and handwritten warnings. Everyone presented their conflicting ideas of what to do with the situation at hand, but Chairman Lee Jun shut the conversation down, rose from the table, and delivered his instruction. The mall would stay open, the escalators would keep running, the employees would keep working, and most importantly, the happy shoppers would keep spending their money.
Then, at 5:40 p.m., without a word to anyone, the executives walked out of the building to safety and left thousands of customers and employees to die. But the story does not begin with that meeting. It had been building since early that morning. Let’s get into it. At 8:05 a.m., the facility manager at Samong Department Store unfolded a handwritten note from the night shift security guard.
It said there was a loud cracking noise coming from the roof. The manager read it twice. Then he folded the note, put it in his pocket, and went upstairs. At 10:02 a.m., he arrived at the food court, which spanned the entirety of the fifth floor, the top floor of the building. By the time he got there, part of the restaurant area had already been closed to the public after staff noticed large cracks running around one of the main concrete columns that supported that floor, but the rest of the department store stayed open.
The manager crouched down to get a closer look at the damage. Some of the cracks were wide enough to slide a finger into. He knew the building well enough to understand what he was looking at. The upper floors depended heavily on columns like this one to carry the load. If one of them started to fall, there was no telling what could happen.
He then moved up to the roof and saw that the concrete there had split in several places with long fractures cutting across the surface. Some areas had sunk lower than others. He worked his way back through the upper levels, speaking to maintenance staff and checking every area that had been flagged. The crew had already moved heavy furniture away from the worst cracks, filed their reports, and put up caution tape to keep the damage out of view from customers.
They wouldn’t want to alarm them. This would be the first of many unfortunate choices made that day that would eventually result in a horrific tragedy, the likes of which the country had never seen. At 10:03 a.m., with the restaurant section still cordoned off, the rest of Sampung opened as usual.
But by midday, the problem was no longer confined to the upper floors. A deep bang echoed through the building loud enough that shoppers on the lower levels paused and looked around. Most assumed it was something being dropped and kept moving. Meanwhile, staff on the upper floors could feel a faint vibration underfoot, and looking up, they could see fine dust shaking loose from the ceilings above them.
Management closed off additional sections above, but the sales floor below still looked entirely normal. Customers kept moving through cosmetic counters and clothing racks. Most had no idea that the fifth floor was partially closed. The escalators were still running. The registers were still opening and shutting. Nothing raised any red flags, even for the workers, like 18-year-old store employee Lee Sunun Min working what she planned to be her final shift before starting college later that summer, or like 19-year-old Eugi Juan.
For her, it was a normal day. She put on her nice shirt and went down to the basement level to start her shift in the Homegoods section selling crystals. She had been working at this job for around 6 months, except she heard a rumor that the fifth floor had sunken a bit. But since no one was being evacuated, she figured there was nothing to worry about and instead just focused on getting through the day. At 12:30 p.m.
, the manager turned his attention to the roof equipment. He saw that the cracks had worsened since morning. The air conditioning units on the roof had been running all day. He ordered to shut them down. The hum that had run through the upper floors all morning went quiet, but it was far too late.
The dust along the crack lines continued to fall. There was nothing anyone could do now to stop what was about to happen. On the fifth floor, heavy kitchen equipment like industrial ovens, massive roomsized refrigerators, and long cooking stations lined the restaurant. All of this was pressing down on a structure already strained by the weight on the rooftop. At 1:30 p.m.
, the manager went back up to the roof. The fractures had spread since his last visit. Several had widened. Fine concrete powder gathered along the edges of the splits where pieces of the roof were grinding against each other. This was the last warning sign for him. He picked up the phone and called his superiors directly, warning them that the building might be at risk.
But the decision of what to do next was unfortunately not his to make. Perhaps if it had been, hundreds of lives could have been spared. At 2:00 p.m., the senior executives of Sampong Department Store gathered in a management office on the fifth floor for an emergency meeting. Reports were set across the table.
Maintenance logs, photos of the cracks, and notes from the facility manager. The air inside the room had gone still since the cooling units have been shut down, making them sweat. As they talked, they wondered why this could be happening. Back in 1987, when Lie Jun’s company was constructing the structure that would later become this mall, the project had originally been approved as only a four-story building for a different use.
They decided to use the flat slab method to save money. It meant that the floors sat directly on columns without thick cross beams or a strong steel frame to spread the weight. In that kind of design, there is no backup support and every column has to be perfect. If one fails, the load has nowhere else to go.
But halfway through construction, the owners made a major decision to convert it into a department store instead. That decision forced engineers to modify the design. An additional floor was added and extensive modifications were made to the gray structure. The redesign pushed the total floor area from the originally intended 720,000 square ft to nearly 800,000.
The building now had to support thousands of shoppers, restaurants, and heavy retail equipment, far beyond what the original structure had been designed for. To make matters worse, these particular columns had been built smaller than the design required. The original blueprint specified columns 79 cm thick.
However, during construction in 1988, that number was reduced by a quarter down to 58 cm to cut construction costs. On top of that, the columns were spread out further than intended, nearly 11 m apart from each other, as per Chairman Lee Jun’s orders. More space between columns meant more room for shops, which meant more rental income.
It also meant that each column was being asked to carry an enormous share of the building’s total load with no margin for error. Even though the changes pushed the building beyond its original load limits, the plan still received approval from the local government office in Coocho district somehow. But there was resistance from the engineers themselves.
Wuang Construction, the firm that was hired to construct the original design, refused to carry out the changes. Their engineers reviewed the new plans and told Lee June that the redesign posed serious structural risks. The modified building would not hold, they said. Lee dismissed them and brought in his own company to carry out the changes, including the addition of the fifth floor.
The problems stacked up from there. Turning the building into a department store meant installing escalators on every floor. To do that, workers cut huge holes through each concrete slab. Every cut removed structural support from the floors. The building also ran into zoning issues. Structures of that size were not supposed to operate entirely as department stores.
Lee found a workaround. He ordered the addition of a skating rink on the brand new fifth floor. But later, he changed his mind again. The skating rink never opened. Before long, it was converted into a cluster of restaurants. Their kitchens heated by hot water pipes laid directly beneath the floor surface. This was another critical mistake, as the heavy kitchen equipment and the thick concrete required for the underfloor heating created a far greater weight burden than the skating rig ever would have.
And just to make things even worse, the fifth floor had another design flaw. The columns on that floor did not line up with the columns beneath them. In a properly engineered structure, columns stack vertically so that weight travels in a straight line from the uppermost floor down through every level to the foundation.
In Sampong, the load transferred sideways through the concrete slab before reaching the next column down, putting even more stress on the columns and floor of the fifth level. Despite all these reckless changes, the building still made it through approval and opened to the public in 1990. And the answer to how it got away with all the violations lies in the timing.
South Korea in the late 1980s was building fast. The economy was booming, cities were expanding, new businesses were opening, and malls were suddenly everywhere. Then came the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Hosting the games meant massive projects everywhere. Stadiums, hotels, roads, and shopping centers for tourists. Deadlines were tight and projects piled on top of each other.
In favor of rapid development, building codes were often poorly enforced. Inspections were rushed and violations were brushed off just so projects could be finished on schedule. Cutting corners was being rewarded. Still, the mall stood with no impeding signs of danger for five straight years. So, what was causing the cracks to appear now? But you know who doesn’t cut corners? >> But you know who? Uh, hey, that’s my line. Not another one, bro.
>> Yes. >> No, not you deja bruise. I meant the original. Uh, never mind. Just don’t take my lines. All right. It’s not cool. >> You know what’s also not cool? Receiving a workplace injury due to negligence of another party. >> Stop turning what I say into segways. Listen, bro. I know you’re new here, but there’s a reason why I do the sponsor segments, okay? Hey, >> just like there’s a reason why Morgan and Morgan, this video’s sponsor, is America’s largest injury law firm.
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So, if you get injured because of someone else’s negligence, you deserve to be paid. And guess what? >> The fee is free unless they win. And that’s what makes them so great. For more information, you can go to forthepeople.com/bw. >> Okay, if you’re quite done taking my job, well then let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming where those mall owners were cutting corners and getting away with it.
But I bet not for long. And as for you, new guy, let’s uh go get you some coffee. Okay. Is there like a brew dispenser that I don’t know about? >> Oh, no. You know him. Back in the meeting, one executive recalled the relocation of the giant air conditioning units from 2 years ago. Not only did the units add additional weight, but residents in nearby apartments had complained about loud noise on the roof.
So, the management decided to move them away from the apartments, but they chose the cheaper option. Instead of hiring a crane again to lift the heavy equipment safely, workers dragged the units across the roof over the concrete surface. Those units weighed over 36 tons. The large tanks alongside them held roughly 87 tons of coolant.
That is equivalent to 30 adult elephants being dragged across a concrete roof. The massive weight gouged the surface and left cracks in several places. When the air conditioning units were powered on again, they vibrated constantly. The vibrations traveled through the damaged roof, down through the mismatched and undersized columns, and into the rest of the structure.
One column in particular took the worst of it. Column 5E on the fifth floor. That was the column the facility manager had been looking at since 8:05 that morning. The damage had been building for years. At 4:00 p.m., the facility manager came rushing into the meeting with an update. His face was pale as he reported that the cracks around column 5E had widened to 4 in since his first inspection that morning.
The structural engineer who had led the completion of the mall’s construction was in the room. After hearing the facility manager’s report, he immediately advised the entire store be closed without any delay. But chairman Lee Jun refused to consider his warning. The crowd that day was unusually large and therefore more profitable.
By 5:00 p.m., workers on the fifth floor could see the ceiling visibly sinking. They cleared out the remaining area on that level, leaving the fifth floor closed off entirely. Four floors below, the sales floor stayed open. Business as usual. Stores were busy. But after over 4 hours of no air conditioning, the heat in the building was starting to get to people.
Staff like Park Sunun, a 19-year-old shop assistant, were starting to sweat through their uniforms. When she asked management about the AC, they told her it wasn’t working, but would be fixed soon and advised her to just continue with her work because the heat wasn’t stopping shoppers like Lee Gunsuk. She was a 44year-old housewife who had stepped out that afternoon with a neighbor to buy groceries for dinner.
Samong was near her apartment building, and when she entered the supermarket on the mall’s ground floor, apart from the heat, nothing seemed off. But up above, more loud bangs came from the fifth floor ceiling as the roof cracked further. To Lee Sun Min, it sounded like a huge explosion. By 5:40 p.m., the executives quietly gathered their things and left the building as the upper floors continued to groan and pop under the weight above.
More and more fine concrete dust drifted down from the cracks. Several thousand people were still inside the building, shopping, eating in the basement food court and moving between floors on the escalators. First year university student Choy Monguk had spent the afternoon working in the children’s shoe section. At around 5:45 p.m.
, he went down to the basement to grab something to eat. 18-year-old Lee Sunun Min was still on her shift on the first basement floor when a co-orker called her over to the other wing of the store. She started to head there and entered the passageway connecting the wings. Meanwhile, 19-year-old Yuji Juan was still selling crystal in the basement when she heard a loud bang.
Everything shook like an earthquake and then went silent. A moment later, at 5:52 p.m., a deep fracture tore through the structure from above. The roof gave away first, overloading the fifth floor, which consequently dropped into the fourth, and the force kept punching down. Floor after floor, collapsing into the basement in under 20 seconds.
Lights cut out as escalators twisted and a wall of pulverized concrete and dust rushed through the building so fast that most people did not understand what was happening until they were already under the rubble. And just like that, almost 1,500 people were trapped in an instant. For Yugji Huan, everything went pitch black.
She was trapped in the rubble shaped like a dome above her. She tried yelling for help, but all she got was silence in response. Concrete, dust, and smoke filled her lungs with every breath. The darkness was so complete that Li Sunun Min couldn’t see her own hands in front of her. Seconds after the impact, a violent pressure wave moved through the broken structure, carrying debris and sound and a heat she could not explain.
When it finally stopped, she could hear screaming from somewhere above her and from somewhere below. Every staircase in the north wing was filled with rubble, leaving her no way out. Rescue crews reached the site within minutes of the collapse, digging into the rubble with bare hands and whatever tools they had with them. They couldn’t use their heavy equipment without the risk of harming potential survivors.
The scale of what they were faced with was immediately clear. The south wing had collapsed completely, leaving the north wing standing alone like a five-story jagged cliff. This remaining structure was visibly unstable. Soul Mayor Cho Pongol, the city official responsible for coordinating this emergency response, faced a decision that had no good answer.
Another partial collapse could kill rescuers working inside. He ordered parts of the rescue operation suspended. Expectedly, families and friends of people still trapped inside erupted in protest outside the site. Demonstrations formed in the thousands. They refused to accept the decision, and they made enough noise that the authorities could not ignore them.
The collapse had also reached beyond the building itself. Cars in the underground garage had been crushed under the falling structure. The shock had cracked the walls of nearby apartment buildings and caused damage to hundreds of surrounding businesses. The scale of what had happened was becoming visible block by block.
Faced with public pressure, Mayor Choy and city officials gave in. The rescue continued. Engineers were called in to stabilize the still standing ruins with guy cables, tying sections of the building to prevent further collapse. Slowly, carefully, rescuers went back in, determined to save as many people trapped under the rubble as possible.
Unfortunately, the operation was disorganized. It took authorities close to an hour to establish a coordinated disaster response. Police failed to set up adequate barriers around the site, allowing civilians and reporters to move freely through the rubble, making it harder for emergency crews to reach those still trapped and harder still to hear anything beneath the noise.
Back in the basement, Lisa Sun Min was physically unharmed, but every exit was sealed. She had no choice but to just sit in complete darkness. Hours passed, breathing dust, listening to the sounds of the ruin settling around her, with no way to know whether anyone was coming or if the rumble around her might cave in at any moment.
On another level, near an escalator by the central hall, Chyong Suk had made it through the initial collapse with his life intact. In the pitch darkness around him, he could hear two women nearby. Both were badly hurt. Neither could see him and he couldn’t see them. The first woman was a 25-year-old store employee. Though they couldn’t see each other, they tried to encourage one another.
But Choy could hear her voice weakening with every word. Eventually, she stopped speaking. The other voice was older, heavy with grief. She called desperately for her children, her voice trembling from both fear and the pain of serious injuries. Joy heard her frantic pleas for hours until she too stopped. Outside through the night of June 29th and into the following day, rescuers began using cranes and heavy machinery with caution, lifting massive slabs of concrete and steel and setting them aside piece by piece. And even after over a day of
non-stop work, the site looked almost unchanged from above. The same mountain of compressed floors, the same rising dust, the same crews moving carefully across surfaces that were still not fully stable. Then at 8:57 p.m. on July 1st, a full 2 days after the collapse, the first trapped survivors were found.
Rescuers reached a basement dressing room that had remained mostly intact. 24 cleaning staff were pulled out alive. That same evening, crews broke through to the section of the basement where Lee Sunun Min had been trapped and brought her out alongside another survivor. However, the situation after those three days grew darker.
3 days is the maximum that most people can survive without water in hot weather. Only dead bodies were being recovered now. And so the mission shifted. The heavy equipment would now be used more aggressively to clear out the remaining debris since they believed there was no one left alive to be harmed underneath. But they were wrong.
On day four, the sounds of the machinery working above were the first things Yugji Huan could remember hearing after the collapse. For the past 4 days, her mind had been fighting with itself. Sometimes she felt like she could survive this, but other days she believed she was going to die. When it rained, she tried to drink the water, but it tasted like rust.
But then the pressure from the heavy equipment above made the rubble around her legs collapse onto them. Pain coursed through her. As time went, the rubble above her started to sink closer and closer to her. She feared for her life, and she feared that her mother would never know what happened to her.
Six more days passed without a living person found. Officials began shifting the operation from rescue to recovery. Many on site were sure no one else could possibly still be alive. But in the dark beneath the rubble, Choy found rainwater pooling in the concrete around him. He drank it to keep himself alive in hopes that someone would find him before it was too late.
Then 9 and 1/2 days after the collapse, at around 9:00 a.m. on July 9th, a construction crew could not believe it as they pulled Choy alive from the wreckage. One day later, Eugi Juan, still alive, could hear the worker’s radios. They called out asking if someone was there. She screamed to them, but they didn’t hear her, so she banged on the rubble.
The chatter turned to excitement as they confirmed someone was alive. She saw the whole opening and felt the relief that she would be able to tell her mother what had happened to herself. They pulled her out and she was rushed to the hospital. These rescues were miracles in their own right, and they didn’t expect to find anyone else after that, especially not 17 days after the building fell, for that’s when rescuers found 19-year-old Park Sunun alive.
She thought only 5 days had passed and asked for water with only a scratch on her leg. The doctors believed she survived so long because she was semi-conscious and may have drunk rain water to sustain herself. She just didn’t remember. She was the last survivor found alive in the wreckage.
By then the search had stretched on for more than 2 weeks. After that the operation recovered only the dead. When it finally ended 502 people were dead. 52 lives. Workers, shoppers, parents, children crushed beneath a building that never should have been allowed to stand in the first place. It took the government 20 days to officially designate the Sampong site a special disaster zone, which finally unlocked emergency funding, resources, and legal authority for rescue operations.
But by that time, there was no one alive to rescue. 9 days after that, the National Assembly formed a special investigation committee to determine what had caused the collapse and who was responsible. Korean lawmakers had already been hearing theories. Earlier that year, two gas explosions had struck other parts of Seoul.
So, some pointed to a similar cause here. Others suggested an act of terrorism, raising the possibility of North Korean involvement. But investigators quickly ruled both theories out. Fires in the rubble came from the gasoline of crushed cars in the underground garage, and the footage of the collapse showed the building fell straight down, not outwards, proving there was no explosion.
The focus soon turned to an investigation into the mall’s construction. The evidence was not difficult to find. Columns were undized. Rebar was insufficient. Escalator holes have been cut through the structural slabs. The building had been carrying far more weight than it was ever designed to hold on a structure that had been altered, overloaded, and inadequately inspected from the moment it was built.
The day after the collapse, Chairman Lee Jun and his son Lie Hansang, who was the store’s president, were arrested. Their photographs circulated on every Korean news channel for days. They became, in a very short period, two of the most infamous people in the country. Yet even after being detained, Lie Jun showed almost no remorse.
In interviews, he said almost nothing about the dead. He only expressed concern for how much money he lost. Lee Jun was charged with negligent homicide for the consequences of his reckless actions. Prosecutors also traced the disaster back to a wider web of corruption, arguing that bribed officials had helped illegal design changes pass the inspection.
As a result, Lee Jun was also charged with bribery. Prosecutors sought a 20-year sentence. Eventually, he would be convicted of criminal negligence and sentenced to 10 years and 6 months in prison. On appeal, that sentence was reduced to 7 years and 6 months. Meanwhile, his son, Hansang Lee, was jailed for 7 years for corruption and accidental homicide.
Part of the Sio local government approval system was found to be corrupt. City officials were also punished for legally approving the building’s designs. Lee Chung Wu, a district administrator connected to the area, received 3 years in prison for bribery. Former Siocheo warch chief Huang Xiao Min was also convicted of taking bribes and received a 10-year sentence.
But for most South Koreans, the punishments still felt painfully small compared with the scale of the disaster. A month after the collapse, with bodies still being identified and families still searching for the missing, the Lee family offered their entire wealth as compensation to the victims. For many of the bererieved, even this did not come close to feeling like justice.
Lie Hansang, Lie Jun’s son and the president of the Sungong Mall, left the business world entirely after his release and became a Christian evangelist in Mongolia. Lie Jun did not live long after leaving prison. He died on October 4th, 2003 after suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease. He had only served roughly half his already reduced sentence.
Most importantly, the collapse forced changes that extended far beyond the Sampong group. In the months that followed, South Korea introduced new disaster management laws and began building a more centralized emergency response system. And when the investigators looked more broadly at the country’s building stock, they found that 14% of high-rise structures were deemed unsafe.
84% required repair work and only 2% fully met safety standards. Sampong was merely a visible consequence of a rotted system infected with bribery and negligence. The site itself was eventually cleared and redeveloped. A luxury apartment complex now stands where the department store once did. In the end, Samong was not a freak accident.
It was the final consequence of greed at every stage of the building’s life during its design, its construction, its illegal modifications, and finally in the decision to not evacuate when the danger was impossible to ignore. 502 people died because one man put profit ahead of human life for years. Another 937 barely made it out alive and were forced to live on with a horrifying trauma.
30 years is a long time, long enough for a collapsed department store to be replaced by a luxury apartment complex. But the people of South Korea still haven’t moved on from the tragedy that unfolded on June 29th, 1995. Chyong Suk, Yugji Huan, and Park Seung Hyun later came to be known as the last survivors.
All three carried what happened to them for the rest of their lives. Yuji Huan spent nearly a decade afraid to use the subway. Haunted by the memory of being trapped underground, Chimyong Suk struggled with nightmares and sleepless nights, replaying screams and falling concrete. Yet over time, he eventually returned to working life and directed his career toward construction safety.
Along with Park Seong Hyun, these final survivors formed a bond that would last a lifetime. Connected by the memory of what almost ended them and how, by a miracle, they still got out alive. But not everyone found closure. Families like that of Lee Gunsuk never learned her fate. Her family filed missing person reports in the weeks that followed and contacted every available agency, but no answers ever came.
For them and so many other families, June 29th, 1995 remains an open wound. Every year on the anniversary, families gather at a memorial tower and honor the memories of the lost loved ones. Recently, the dead were remembered on the 30th anniversary in 2025 at the Sampong Disaster Memorial Tower in Mahun Citizens Forest, where bereieved families gathered and laid out 502 pink pin wheels across the ground, one for each person who did not come home.
