At least eight people were killed, ranging in age from 14 to 27, and dozens more were injured at a music festival in Houston on Friday night after a large crowd began pushing toward the front of the stage, the city officials said at a news conference Saturday afternoon.
The crowd surge, during a performance by the rapper Travis Scott, “caused some panic, and it started causing some injuries,” the city’s fire chief, Samuel Peña, said Saturday morning. The concert was part of the Astroworld music festival, a two-day event that began on Friday. About 50,000 people were there on Friday night, according to the Fire Department.“It was like hell,” said Nick Johnson, 17, who still had his concert bracelet on as he spoke Saturday morning. Everybody pushing the front.
“I’m sending investigators to the hospitals because we just don’t know,” Chief Finner said. “We’re going to do an investigation and find out, because it’s not fair to producers, to anybody else involved, until we determine what happened, what caused the surge.”
“It happened all at once,” Larry Satterwhite, the executive assistant chief of the Houston police, said at the news conference. He said that at one point, several people in the crowd fell to the ground and began experiencing what he called a medical episode.
The company organizing the festival, Live Nation, agreed to stop the performance early in the interest of public safety, Chief Satterwhite said.
It appeared to be one of the deadliest crowd-control disasters at a concert in the United States in many years, recalling the 1979 crush outside the doors of a show by the Who in Cincinnati that left 11 people dead and stunned the nation.
Similar episodes have occurred at venues around the world, during performances of all genres of music. In 2010, 21 people died in a crush at an electronic dance music festival in Germany. Ten years earlier, nine people were killed at a Pearl Jam concert in Denmark. There also have been tragedies at concerts involving fires or shootings, including the 2003 nightclub fire at a heavy metal concert in Rhode Island in which 100 people died.
Like some of those performances, Friday’s event was “hectic from the beginning,” according to one concertgoer, Neema Djavadzadeh.
“I got there around 3 and saw people already struggling to stand straight,” she said on Saturday. “There was a lot of mob mentality going on, people willing to do whatever to be in line for merch, food, shows, you name it. A lot of fights broke out throughout the day.”
“Travis Scott, he took pauses to point at the crowd to say, like, ‘Go help them — they’re passed out,’” Angel Rodriguez, a concertgoer, said on Saturday morning. “He did it like three times. He pointed to the area where it was and said for everybody in the area to go help them and bring them to the front.”
Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement on Saturday, “What happened at Astroworld Festival last night was tragic, and our hearts are with those who lost their lives and those who were injured in the terrifying crowd surge.”
Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting.
— Azi Paybarah, Maria Jimenez Moya and Aina J. Khan
‘This is a young crowd’: Houston mayor says the dead ranged in age from 16 to 23
Mayor Sylvester Turner, a native Houstonian, has known the family of Travis Scott for years: Mr. Scott’s mother, his sister, his grandmother.
Though he is not close with Mr. Scott, he has sought to support Houston artists like the rapper. Now, after the deadly crowd surge at Friday’s event, he is pledging a “thorough review and investigation.”
In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Turner said that there had been roughly 11 people in cardiac arrest at the show, though he cautioned that the causes of the deaths at the concert were still under review.
“We had more security over there than we had at the World Series games,” he said, noting that the event took place on county property, with security organized by the city of Houston. The Houston Police Department provided hundreds of officers, he said, “in addition to what I’m told were 240 or 250 non-police security that was there.”
He said it was too early to say whether the security operation was adequate or what led to the eight deaths. “I’m going to hold any sort of conclusion pending a thorough review and investigation,” he said.
“We do know that there were several cases of cardiac arrest. What was the cause of that?” he said. It was too early to determine whether any of the deaths were connected to drug overdoses, he said.
“I don’t even want to go to drug overdoses,” he said. “We are looking at all potential causes of this incident or what caused the cardiac arrest. We’re not taking anything off the table.”
The mayor said that preliminary reports suggested that most of the injuries occurred “in one particular area. This was not all throughout the front part of the staging area.”
Investigators were reviewing the video, interviewing witnesses, and talking to those who were transported to hospitals, he said, adding that the injured included a child as young as 10 who had been treated for injuries. Overall, the mayor’s office said, the ages of the dead ranged from 16 to 23.
“This is a young crowd,” Mr. Turner said.
The mayor said he has longstanding connections to Mr. Scott’s family. “I’ve worked with the family, I’ve worked with Travis, I’ve worked with his mom,” he said. “This is a tragic case and that’s why I want a very, very thorough investigation of this.”
Mr. Turner said that he believed that Mr. Scott was devastated by the event, but that he had not yet spoken to the musician or his family. “This is the last thing any of them wanted to see happen,” the mayor said. “I’ve sent him a text. I haven’t spoken to him personally.”
AstroworldMusic Festivalat NRG Park