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On Travis Scott’s Utopia Mountain, a night of release turns deadly

An ambulance is seen in the crowd during the Astroworld music festival in Houston on Nov. 5 in this still image obtained from a social media video. (Twitter @onacasella/Twitter @onacasella Via Reuters)

HOUSTON — It was a sea of people, an explosion of pent-up joy, a chance, finally, to be out somewhere fabulous with a zillion other people, virus be damned. It was a wild and ecstatic return to the before times, with big-name acts and big-time fireworks.

It was trouble from the start.

Many of the music fans crammed into the Astroworld Festival here on Friday thought it was a magical night — until rap superstar Travis Scott held his arm out to stop the music. From his perch high above the stage, Scott could see tens of thousands of fans, bouncing, throbbing, dancing shoulder to shoulder, moving as one, closer, closer, impossibly close.

Closer and closer until there was simply nowhere for people to move, and they pressed and fell upon each other, and they could not budge, and they could not breathe, and their systems overloaded, and they were crushed. Eight people, all between the ages of 14 and 27, died, according to Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner. Hundreds more were injured.

“I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night,” Scott, a Houston native, wrote Saturday on Twitter, vowing to work with police and help the community heal.

Excitement, then chaos: Eight dead after crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival

An estimated 50,000 people had packed the NRG Park sports complex for the first night of the sold-out, two-day festival, having paid at least $350 apiece to see Scott perform in front of an elaborate set, a volcanic construction he called “Utopia Mountain.”

The annual extravaganza, staged at a sprawling venue that used to be the Six Flags Astroworld amusement park, was named for Scott’s hit studio album, and this was its grand return after the coronavirus pandemic scratched last year’s event. Scott, 29, said this would be the biggest show yet. Promoters said they sold out the 100,000 tickets for the two days of concerts almost immediately back in May. Earlier this week, resellers were getting an average of $993 per ticket, according to online ticket sites.

It was a star-studded evening — Drake was there, as was Scott’s partner Kylie Jenner, who is pregnant with their second child — but mainly, it was a bouncing, throbbing crowd of young Americans bursting at the seams to get back into the world after 18 months of covid-constricted life.

Above one stage, where SZA and Lil Baby played, a giant banner promised “THRILLS.” The other stage, where Scott performed, was dubbed “CHILLS.”

But the festival day was a mess from just after dawn.

Hamad Albarrack, a student at the University of Southern California who came to Houston for the festival with two friends, arrived at the gates at about 7:30 a.m.

After a quick look at the scene, Albarrack told his friend, “Oh no, it’s going to be a bad day.”

Revved up and impatient to get inside the concert grounds, “people were chucking water bottles from literally eight in the morning,” Albarrack said. He watched the crowd knock down barricades and storm the gates.

A girl tripped and got caught under a gate and “people just kept running,” he said. “It was as if she wasn’t even there.” He stopped to help her, but she immediately got up and joined the running crowd, he said.

A bit later, at a merchandise stand, Albarrack watched security officers shut down sales because too many people were pushing against the gates trying to get inside.

Astroworld was supposed to be a mind-blowing collection of top stars. “Open your eyes to a whole new universe,” read the promotions for the concert, assuring customers that “your health, safety and security are always our top priority.” No one would be admitted without proof of vaccination or a negative test for covid-19, organizers said.

But any effort to control the crowd collapsed soon after the gates opened.

Early on the bright afternoon, more than seven hours before the deadly stampede, hundreds of people burst through checkpoints, running past and knocking over metal detectors, leaping over walls and rushing into the venue to be in position to party.

Uniformed private security officers could only stand by and watch, occasionally grabbing hold of a fan to no effect. Police on horseback arrived, but the animals merely bucked back and forth as running fans pivoted around the show of force.

Video clips of that scene made their way around social media early in the afternoon and Neema Djavadzadeh, a 22-year-old Houston native who had flown home from New York to attend the festival with his sister, said the two of them “looked at each other and I said, ‘Man, I don’t know how I feel about going now.’”

But this was his graduation gift to his sister, and he’d been to the previous Astroworld shows and was eager to see Scott. They decided to go for it.

When they arrived at about 3 p.m., Djavadzadeh said the security operation already seemed chaotic. At the entrance, security personnel were not matching vaccination cards with IDs, and there didn’t appear to be a wristband system for buying alcohol, he said. Twice, he said, he bought drinks without being carded.

“A lot of people were comparing it to Woodstock ’99 with how nobody really cared that a lot of terrible stuff was going on,” Djavadzadeh said.

When Trey Diller arrived at the festival around 3 p.m., he said he found “a very well-organized and produced show.” Diller, who owns Inspire Productions, a Houston events company, said he spent 35 minutes passing through the festival’s covid protocol area, ticket check, security and merchandise zones and concluded that “they had all their ducks in a row.”

But the trampling started early — something Diller said had happened at previous Astroworld festivals as well. “When you cram that many people in and mix in the drugs and the alcohol, that will change the game,” he said. “It’s something you can’t control.”

The concert began in daylight and the crowd — and the acts — kept coming, well into the evening. It was a happy crowd — mostly teens and young adults, but quite a few children too, with parents beside them, some bewildered, some totally thrilled to be there.

Especially up front, but throughout the huge field, the crowd was packed together. In many places, concertgoers said, if you danced, your neighbor danced too, because your bodies were smack up against each other. That’s how it is at many big concerts, and the crowding didn’t seem scary at first.

Deadly crushes of crowds happen tragically often at mass events. At least 110 stampedes involving multiple fatalities have been recorded in the past 20 years, at soccer games, religious pilgrimages, nightclubs, food giveaways and concerts around the world. They are as often driven by joy and anticipation as by fear or danger.

“Anybody who’s been to a Travis Scott show knows that … the energy exchange between him and the crowd is really, it’s really electric,” said Joey Guerra, a music critic for the Houston Chronicle who was covering the festival. “It’s really amped up, it’s very passionate and fervent. There’s moshing … [and] he calls his fans ‘ragers,’ so that kind of aggressive, high-pitched energy is, I think, a signature of his show.

“It’s what people expect and what they go for,” Guerra said. “When it’s in a controlled, safe environment …, there’s nothing like it, in a good way. You know, this just kind of went wrong very quickly.”

After the acts at the THRILLS stage wound down, Scott began the main event over at CHILLS.

At about 8:50 p.m., just before Scott took the stage, concertgoer Madeline Eskins, an ICU nurse in the Houston area, felt the vibe shifting. There was more shoving, more pushing.

Eskins, 23, spent 25 minutes with the crowd squeezing her into an ever-smaller space. There was no place to go. She passed out.

She woke about 15 minutes later in a general admissions area with a bottle of water in her lap. She learned that a stranger had helped her boyfriend crowdsurf her limp body over a fence to a secure area.

The people being carried into safety “were in pretty bad shape,” she said. She saw people with their eyes rolling back in their heads, people without a detectable pulse. When a guard heard that Eskins was an ICU nurse, he asked her to help and brought her to the front of a VIP area that had been turned into an impromptu field hospital.

“There were three people sprawled out, receiving CPR,” she said. Another woman had her shirt ripped open as a paramedic applied defibrillator paddles.

“As an ICU nurse,” she said, “we have organized procedures in place when people go into cardiac arrest. But this was hell.”

As fans screamed for help, Jake Scampini found himself trapped by some stranger’s arm.

“I started freaking out,” Scampini said. “I thought I was going to pass out. I had to breathe out of my nose because I had an arm around my throat and my mouth.”

Scampini and a friend made their way out of the crush and were able to jump a fence to safety.

As a giant countdown clock ticked away the time remaining before Scott’s show would begin, Alana Stevenson and two of her friends were in the middle of the crowd, to the right of the stage, edging their way toward the center to get a better view.

With a few minutes left, Stevenson, 20, found that there was “really becoming nowhere to move.” Then, she said, as his first number started, “immediately the pushes begin, which is a given, especially for a Travis Scott concert.”

But it kept getting worse, Stevenson said, and the shorter of her friends felt crushed by the crowd. Stevenson and another other friend pulled their shorter buddy out. They saw the body of an apparently unconscious girl being surfed over the crowd toward safety. They realized they had to get out.

“The crazy part about it is, we weren’t even close to the stage,” Stevenson said. “It’s about two and a half songs in, and this is where people are really basically screaming bloody murder, asking for help. This is where people start almost like, knocking each other out, trying to push people out of the way, everyone’s panicking at the same time. No one’s understanding that there’s nowhere for anyone to go.”

“We were literally partying in a graveyard,” Stevenson said. “There was dead bodies and people kept going.”

Closer to the stage, as Scott started his set, Guerra, the music critic, noticed an emergency vehicle cutting through the crowd, lights flashing. Then another, and another.

From above, from the dramatic camera angles available to viewers of the live stream of the concert on Apple Music, the front sections of the crowd looked like one organism, pulsing and surging forward, almost in beat with the music.

On the ground, each shove toward the stage ratcheted up the panic. People fell, people were crushed, people couldn’t breathe.

Desmond Gary, 25, an Astroworld festival veteran attending his seventh Scott show, got pushed all the way to the front of the stage. He watched a rescue cart “moving at a snail’s place because, like, there was nowhere for us to go,” he said. “Some people started jumping and dancing on the carts, recording themselves as if it was cool.”

When Drake appeared onstage to join Scott, the pushing accelerated, Gary said. Each row of people got squished into the next row closer to the stage, and “we started getting, like, stacked up, like row by row just because we were getting pushed to, like, the front.”

Gary, who is big and tall, had the advantage of being able to see what was happening closer to the stage, and of having been to Scott shows before.

“If you know anything about Travis Scott, you know his shows are going to be crazy,” he said. “And so I don’t think a lot of these kids are really prepared for that. So they try to make their way to the front, you know, not really knowing what was going to go down. It kind of just turned into like, World War III out there, like people literally fighting for their lives.”

All the while, the beat went on.

Concertgoer Cody Hartt said on Twitter that he “screamed for help so many times, alerted security, asked everyone in the crowd if there was anyone who was CPR certified. Every call went unanswered.” He said crew members told him the show could not be halted because it was being streamed live.

But as Scott’s show progressed, some people up front chanted “Stop it, stop it,” and a few minutes in, the rapper seemed to acknowledge that something was going on. He was quiet for a bit, but it wasn’t clear whether he could see the medical emergencies on the ground.

“Help,” a woman screamed repeatedly. “Help us!”

On stage, Scott nodded and smiled, apparently interpreting the screams as excitement about the show.

But about 20 minutes into his set, he realized something was amiss.

“Hold on, hold on,” he said. “Turn the lights on. I think I see somebody in the tree …, a small boy hanging in the tree right there.”

And then, back to the show.

“I want to see some rages,” Scott told the crowd. “Who wants to rage? … Make some noise!” A roar swept over the mass and the music started up anew.

At least four times, Scott stopped and restarted the show.

After another song, he noticed an ambulance making its way into the crowd. “What the f--- is that?” he said. Then he asked fans to raise their hands to the sky and said, “Y’all know what you came to do,” and launched into the next number, saying “I want to make this motherf---ing ground shake, g------t, here we go.”

By about 9:30, Djavadzadeh had made his way to a less chaotic place at the back of the crowd. Along the way, he saw people falling down, struggling to stay upright.

“People were trying to get help from cameramen, security guards,” he said. He heard one woman call for help because she had broken her toes. “People were just stomping on and stepping on whoever,” he said.

Djavadzadeh heard Scott pause the show several times when he seemed to noticed distress in the crowd. But the fan wasn’t sure halting the performance was the right move; he worried about how the hopped-up crowd might react.

“If he stopped the show, people would have gone crazy,” Djavadzadeh said.

At about 9:35 p.m., pleading and begging concertgoers climbed up a ladder onto one of the risers built to give the camera crew an unfettered view. Concertgoers’ videos show fans bent over in anguish, urging anyone in authority to halt the show.

Up by the stage, the crowd was divided, yelling at each other and at the performers to stop, to continue, to shut the f--- up.

Even as panicked fans crawled under camera stations to find a respite from the pushing, others scampered atop those risers to keep on dancing. As rescue workers nudged their vehicle toward unconscious people, others jumped up onto its roof to improve their view.

Diller counted at least five interruptions of the show. Still, depending on where you were in the crowd, he said, it wasn’t clear that there’d been serious injuries.

At one point, more than 30 minutes into his set, Scott stopped again. “Oh-oh-oh,” he sang. And then, “Oh. Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly serious. He held his arm out to the musicians behind him and they went silent.

“We need somebody to help, somebody’s passed out right here,” Scott said, pointing from his perch high above the stage. “Hold on, don’t touch him, don’t touch him.”

The concert’s light show continued, sparkling stars encircling the rapper, orange bolts of light pulsating across the stage.

“Everybody just back up,” Scott directed from the stage, but there was no place for people to go. All was silent now. “Security, somebody help, jump in real quick. Come on, come on, security, get in there, let’s get in there, let’s get in there, let’s get in there.”

The artist stared out at an ambulance, lights flashing, moving through the crowd, its progress glacial. There were just too many people with nowhere to go.

Scott finished his last song and told the audience, “I love y’all. Make it home safe. Good night!”

“The crowd for whatever reason began to push and surge toward the front of the stage, which caused the people in the front to be compressed,” Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña said Saturday. “They were unable to escape that situation.”

There appeared to be no reason why other than the simplest, most brutal explanation: To get closer.

As panic spread, it became harder for security officials to move toward the people in need.

“People began to fall out, become unconscious, and it created additional panic,” Peña said.

More than 300 people were treated on the field, officials said. Twenty-three people were transported to local hospitals, 11 of them in cardiac arrest.

Even far from the stage, the pushing had been “the most intense situation at a concert I’ve ever witnessed,” one fan tweeted. “Everyone kept pushing up closer & closer to the front of the stage, we could barely move an inch at all. Many had to fight HARD to move back in the crowd. My chest is in so much pain from it.”

As the crowd dissipated, exhausted EMTs, firefighters and people who had simply stepped up to help took a moment to consider what they’d just seen and done.

Lauren Cude, a health care worker in the audience, tweeted that she saw “untrained teens” giving CPR to struggling fans because there weren’t enough medics at the scene.

I did CPR on more people today at AstroWorld than 7 years in the Marine Corps,” tweeted Lucas Naccarati.

Into the small of the night and on through a dreary dawn, the site cleared, day two of the festival was scrapped, and the thousands who had recorded bits and pieces of the horror on their phones posted their strands of reality on Instagram, Twitter and Reddit and on and on around the globe.

Amid so many voices, a few plaintive pleas pierced the noise:

My friend is missing, they said. My child is out there somewhere.

“Please help me find my cousin,” one said. “He was at #Astroworld and is not responding to calls/texts.”

There were numbers to call. There was a reunification center to go to. But now, hours afterward, there was mainly, finally, silence.

Fisher and Alfaro reported from Washington. Deborah Blumberg in Houston and Kim Bellware in Washington contributed to this report.

Complete coverage: 10 dead in crowd surge at Astroworld Festival

A crowded music festival in Houston turned deadly on Nov. 5 when a crush of concertgoers surged toward the stage where rapper Travis Scott was performing. Ten people have died.

The crowd surge victims include a 14-year-old who loved baseball, two friends celebrating a 21st birthday and a 27-year-old attending the concert with his fiancee. Here’s what we know about the victims.

At least seven of the 10 dead were clustered in a small area enclosed on three sides by metal barriers that became dangerously crowded.

Videos from the concert, where an estimated 50,000 people gathered, show attendees pleading for the event to end. Here’s what those videos show.

A criminal investigation is underway in Houston as law enforcement officials seek to understand how the deaths occurred.

Travis Scott’s concerts are known for their wild energy and the Astroworld Festival, launched in 2018, has become his signature event. Scott’s partner Kylie Jenner said early Sunday that he was unaware “of any fatalities until the news came out after the show.”

Fatal crowd surges at concerts continue, despite calls for tighter standards and security, experts say. Here’s a history of these events.

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