Astroworld Festival 2021 latest: 14-year-old among dead as Travis Scott ‘devastated’ by tragic loss at concert

ICYMI: Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said that it took 40 minutes to stop the event after the crowd surge first began.

The first report of trouble, he said, was around 9:30pm local time, and the concert did not stop until 10:10pm.

If true, that raises questions about how well Live Nation and its private security and medical contractors responded to the incident.

By contrast, fire chief Chief Samuel Peña said that after a “mass casualty event” was declared, it took two minutes for the first of his units to be on the scene.

ICYMI: County Judge Lina Hidalgo is speaking now, visibly close to tears as she described the horror of the accident.

“The events of last night were tragic; beyond belief,” she said. “This is an artist that we know has a following amongst young people, in particular young people with bright futures. Those are the people that were at the event.

“They went to have a good time, and no one – no parent, no friend, no sibling should see their loved one off to a concert by a world-renowned artists and not be able to expect them to come home safely.

“When we read the ages [of the victims]… it just breaks your heart, and I know that the images we’ve seen are hard to stomach, and I imagine more will surface that are hard to stomach.

“Since late last night I’ve been on the scene. I spent time at the reunification centre talking to families, hearing their anguish, those that didn’t know where their loved ones were. Sometimes it’s harder not to know.”

ICYMI: Houston mayor Sylvester Turner is now giving a press conference. He says one of the people who died was a teenager of just 14 years old.

Of the other seven people who perished, Mr Turner said one was 16 years old, two were 21, one was 23, one was 27, and one’s age remains unknown.

He said 25 were taken to hospital, of which five were under the age of 18, and 13 are still recovering there. Nobody has been reported missing.

The youngest victim of the deadly crowd surge at a Travis Scott concert in Houston was just 14 years old, according to the city’s mayor.

Eight people were killed in the chaos at the Astroworld Festival, and dozens more were injured. The victims who lost their lives range from ages 14 to 27, the mayor told a press conference on Saturday.

Sheila Flynn has the story.

Police Chief Troy Finner confirmed that one security guard had at the event had been pricked with a needle.

Police Chief Troy Finner said that there were 528 Houston Police officers on site, 755 private security guards and a third-party company provided medics.

A woman who was in the audience when the crush began has claimed that festival staff repeatedly ignored her attempts to get help.

Seanna Faith McCarty, an artist, described on Instagram on Friday night how she begged for help from a camera operator, a guard, and an emergency dispatcher as guests screamed and struggled to breathe.

Her post may be distressing for some readers, as it vividly describes suffocation and mass panic.

She said: “Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, people began to drown – in other people. Breathing became something only a few were capable of. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick, hot air.

“The shoving got harder and harder. If someone’s arms had been up, it was no longer a possibility to put [them] down… our lungs were compressed between the bodies of those surrounding us.

“More and more people began to scream for help; some began to collapse. The music continued…. the screaming intensified as more people realised they could not breathe. We begged security to help us, for the performer to see us and know something was wrong. None of that came.”

As the mass of people swayed and shoved to escape, one individual collapse triggered a cascade of falling people, “like a Jenga tower toppling”. Many people were “sucked down” and began to fall on top of one another, “at the mercy of the wave”.

The result was “a floor of bodies” three layers deep, with those on the bottom being trampled and some falling unconscious. Eventually Ms McCarty was pulled out over the railing to safety.

However, Ms McCarty then writes that nobody outside the crowd had noticed what was happening. She claims to have climbed a ladder to a camera platform and “screamed over and over again” at staff, but been ignored and then threatened with being thrown off the platform.

She says that other guests, apparently unaware of the tragedy unfolding, booed at her and she climbed down. She called emergency services and begged them to stop the concert, to no avail.

Finally she met two medical staff in red shirts and, backed up by two girls who had been in the crush, persuaded them to intervene.

Her post concludes: “We waited, the two girls and I, and watched people being thrown over the railing, trying to escape the cage we had been in.”

Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said that as the event took place on county property and that security was organised by the city of Houston.

He told The New York Times that the city’s police department had provided hundreds of officers, in addition to “240 or 250 non-police security that were there.”

“We had more security over there than we had at the World Series games,” Mr Turner told the newspaper.

The city’s Houston Astros lost to the Atlanta Braves in the MLB finals.

Chief of police Troy Finner has made a shocking suggestion: that a security officer at the concert may have been injected with drugs by an unknown person at the time of the surge.

He said: “One of the narratives [going around] was that some individual was injecting other people with drugs. We do have a report of a security officer, according to the medical staff that treated him last night, that he was reaching over to restrain or grab a citizen and he felt a prick in his neck.”

He said the officer was revived with Narcan, a nasal spray used to treat suspected opioid overdoses, and that medical staff “did notice a prick that was similar to what you would get if somebody was trying to inject”.

Chief Finner said that this is now a criminal investigation that will involve Houston’s homicide and narcotics divisions.

Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said the dead ranged from age 16 to age 23, telling CNN: “This is a young crowd.”

He also confirmed that one of the injured people was a child, perhaps as young as ten years old.