Sechs Kies' Eun Ji-won Thought His Bandmate Died Before Learning He'd Quietly Left Seoul

Sechs Kies' Eun Ji-won revealed on the 21st that he once filed a missing persons report for his own bandmate, Kim Jae-duk, after all attempts to reach him failed. The punchline, delivered to a table of visibly stunned fellow idols, was that Kim had simply relocated to Busan without telling anyone.

The story came out during 다시 데뷔하면 리더 할래 말래 | 정기잡담회 (roughly, "If You Debuted Again, Would You Be the Leader?"), a roundtable episode uploaded to the YouTube channel Channel Bandal. Eun Ji-won was joined by EXO's Suho, SEVENTEEN's S.Coups, and BOYNEXTDOOR's Myung Jae-hyun for a wide-ranging cross-generational conversation about idol group life.

The unreachable member problem

The topic of members going off the grid came up naturally when S.Coups mentioned that Joshua had left one of his KakaoTalk messages unread for an entire month. He was quick to add some context: Joshua had hundreds of unread messages stacked up, so it wasn't personal. The detail got a laugh, but it also opened a door.

Eun Ji-won stepped through it immediately. "We had a member like that too," he said, "so I filed a missing persons report. I thought he had disappeared."

What followed landed harder. "I genuinely thought the kid had died alone," he continued. "It was Jae-duk. I couldn't reach him at all, so I reported it. And then the shocking part: he wasn't even in Seoul. He had cleared out his Seoul apartment and moved down to Busan."

Kim Jae-duk had packed up, changed cities, and neglected to mention any of it to his bandmates.

The thing Eun Ji-won finds most annoying

Eun Ji-won also drew a distinction that clearly resonates with anyone who has stared at a read receipt that never arrives. Being slow to check messages is one thing, he said, but the move he finds genuinely irritating is when someone ignores a whole backlog of texts and then suddenly reaches out the moment they have something to say, leaving every previous message untouched.

The rest of the table agreed without hesitation. Every group, it seems, has that one member who operates on their own communication timeline. For Sechs Kies, that member apparently now does it from Busan.