“They could have had over 200,000 people in this venue this venue was limited to 50,000,” said the Houston fire chief, Samuel Peña. At the news conference, officials said the concert venue had not been overcrowded. Earlier in the day, some had rushed the gate, and some people may have entered without tickets. “The medical staff did notice a prick that was similar to a prick that you would get if somebody was trying to inject,” he said.Īnother element of the investigation, according to a county official, would be whether too many people had been in attendance. The officer passed out but was revived using Narcan, which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. One security officer appeared to have been pricked in the neck as he tried to restrain someone at the concert, Chief Finner said. Investigators were looking into the circumstances of the surging crowd - studying the numerous videos recorded from inside the venue and talking to concertgoers - and into what had caused eight people to die, including whether drugs may have played a part. “We have to worry about rioting, riots, when you have a group that’s that young.” “You cannot just close when you got 50,000 and over 50,000 individuals,” he said. But the Houston police chief, Troy Finner, said that officials worried that cutting off the concert could make the situation worse. It was not clear how much of the chaos could be seen from the stage or when concert organizers became aware of a serious problem beyond the usual number of injuries that can take place at a large event. 40 minutes after city officials said the “mass casualty event” had begun. Live Nation stopped the concert roughly 30 minutes earlier than planned, around 10:10 p.m. Scott continued playing through his set of music, urging the crowd on at times, at other times pausing to acknowledge that something appeared to be wrong, including when an ambulance entered the crowd around 9:30 p.m. Questions raised by concertgoers and local officials included whether there had been adequate security and medical personnel on hand for the event, and whether the concert could have been shut down sooner. “There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said. “Perhaps the plans were inadequate, perhaps the plans were good but they weren’t followed, perhaps it was something else entirely,” she said, calling for an independent investigation. She and other officials at an afternoon news conference struggled to explain what had taken place the night before. ![]() “Young people with bright futures - those were the people who were at the event,” said Lina Hidalgo, the top executive for Harris County, which includes Houston. ![]() So too were those who had been at the outdoor concert, who described a thrust of the crowd that would not let up as Mr. Scott, had transformed in an instant from a celebration to a struggle for life. ![]() Among those treated at a hospital was a 10-year-old child.īy Saturday, officials in Houston were at a loss to explain how the concert, part of the two-day Astroworld music festival organized by Live Nation and Mr. Hundreds more were treated for injuries at a field hospital at the concert venue, the NRG Park in Houston, or at local hospitals. In the end, eight people died, ranging in age from 14 to 27, according to city officials. Others shouted out for help with CPR and pleaded for the concert to stop. Concertgoers lifted up the unconscious bodies of friends and strangers and surfed them over the top of the crowd, hoping to send them to safety. It came like a wave, an unstoppable movement of bodies that could not be held back. HOUSTON - Panic and then desperation spread through the crowd of 50,000 mostly young people just as the popular hometown rapper they had come to see, Travis Scott, took the stage Friday night.
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