Organizer of South Korea concert where 16 died kills himself

The organizer of a South Korean concert where 16 people died Friday evening has been found dead after committing suicide, police told the local media.

Police said the man, surnamed Oh, 37, was found dead Saturday in Seongnam, a suburb south of Seoul, after having jumped 10 stories from a building near the site of the concert.

Eleven people were injured along with the 16 who died during a performance by 4Minute, a popular Kpop group, when a ventilation grate they were standing on collapsed. Television reports said victims fell about 65 feet.

The YTN network reported that concert organizers had repeatedly asked attendees to get off the grate before it collapsed.

The police are currently investigating the cause of the collapse. A source with the police told South Korean news agency Newsis that Oh had been questioned for an hour and twenty minutes starting at 2 a.m. Saturday.

“If violations of safety rules are found, we will take actions to punish those responsible for the accident,” an unnamed police officer told Yonhap News Agency.

It is not known if Oh left a suicide note, but Newsis reported that he sent a text message to a colleague early Saturday apologizing to his family and the families of those who died in the accident.

South Korea has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world. People in positions of responsibility sometimes take their own lives in times of crisis as a gesture of shame or contrition.

In April, the day after a ferry sinking took the lives of around 300 people, many of them high school students, the vice principal of the school that organized the trip hanged himself from a tree near the site of the sinking.