Students express their thoughts on the aftermath of Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival

BY SYDNEY JOHNSON, STAFF WRITER

About 50,000 people were in attendance at the Astroworld concert hosted by American rapper Travis Scott. Due to lack of crowd control during the event, fans were unable to move their arms and breathe while in the crowd, according to the Associated Press. As a result, the death toll was at ten people by publication.

Scott hosted his festival Astroworld in Houston, Texas at NRG Park from Friday, Nov. 5 until Saturday, Nov. 6. This was the third annual festival Scott had hosted for his fans along with other artists, including SZA, Toro Y Moi and Lil Baby.

Nothing could have prepared concert-goers or venue employees for what was about to happen after the festival had started, however.

“As someone who goes to a number of concerts every year, for about 15 years now, both stadium and festival, I’ve noticed a lot of more disturbing behavior in the past year than ever before,” Mason grad Jared Purcell commented.

Concert-goers tried to stop the show as more people were getting injured from the extreme conditions. 18-year-old Ayden Cruz from Houston has gone viral in a video where he can be seen yelling at Astroworld security to “stop the show,” according to ABC News.

 “I came across one of the videos where people were telling Travis to ‘stop the show’ and he was just doing nothing about it,” junior Jason Wadle said. “I definitely believe Travis Scott is at a large amount of fault here for not only encouraging a crowd surge, but also doing nothing to stop the madness when it was made clearly aware to him he needed to.”

The ages of the victims ranged from 14-27 years old, according to ABC News. John Hilgert, a ninth-grade student at Memorial High School, was the youngest who died during the incident.

“When I first heard the news, I was scrolling through Tik Tok when all of a sudden my feed was filled with videos from the concert,” sophomore Sophia Ngyuen commented. “Seeing the videos made me entirely sick, as most of them were very much gruesome and hard to watch.”

 A total of 300 people were treated at the NRG field hospital throughout the day due to heat exhaustion, alcohol poisoning and overdoses, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The concert venue, Live Nation, ended the concert early at about 30 minutes before Scott was supposed to end his set, according to The New York Times. City officials confirmed the event to be a “mass casualty event” 40 minutes before it had ended.

 The festival appeared to be one of the deadliest crowd-control disasters at a concert in the United States in comparison to the 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati that left 11 people dead, according to the Times.