A crowd surge during the Travis Scott headlining performance at Astroworld Festival has killed at least eight people and left hundreds more injured on Friday night.
Roughly 50,000 people gathered at a sold-out NRG Park in Houston, TX for the first of two nights at Astroworld, which boasted a lineup featuring Tame Impala, SZA, Chief Keef, Travis Scott, who hosted the event. At some point during Scott’s headlining performance, members of the crowd began pushing forward, creating a deadly situation for those at the front.
“At approximately nine o’clock, 9:15, the crowd began to compress towards the front of the stage, ” said Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña during a press conference late Friday night. “That caused some panic and it started causing some injuries. People began to fall out, become unconscious, and it created additional panic.”
Peña went on to explain that 17 patients were transported to nearby hospitals, 11 of whom were in cardiac arrest, along with over 300 treated at a field hospital near NRG Park. According to CNN, a 10-year-old patient remains in critical condition after transportation to a local hospital.
“It was like hell,” 17-year-old Nick Johnson told the New York Times. “Everybody was just in back, trying to rush to the front.”
“Suddenly we had several people down on the ground, experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode,” Houston Police Executive Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite told CBS News. “And so we immediately started doing CPR, and moving people right then, and that’s when I went and met with the promoters, and Live Nation, and they agreed to end early in the interest of public safety.”
Early Saturday morning, Astroworld Festival posted a statement to its Twitter account, saying “Our hearts are with the Astroworld Festival family tonight—especially those we lost and their loved ones. We are focused on supporting local officials however we can. With that in mind, the festival will no longer be held on Saturday. As authorities mentioned in their press conference earlier, they are looking into the series of cardiac arrests that took place. If you have any relevant information on this, please reach out to @HoustonPolice.”
The deadly incident followed a surge of concertgoers through the VIP entrance earlier in the day, which left one person injured as police scrambled to get the situation under control. Back in 2019, a similar stampede occurred at the entrance to Astroworld Festival, leaving three people injured.
Below, you can watch a pair of news broadcasts featuring additional information, as well as clips from officials’ press conferences.
Our thoughts are with anyone and everyone affected by this tragic event.
KRPC-2 News Report On Deadly Astroworld Fesitval At NRG Park
TODAY News Report On Deadly Astroworld Fesitval At NRG Park
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