Astroworld Tragedy

Jacob Hickey knew something was wrong the moment he walked through the turnstiles at Astroworld last Friday night. Having attended more than 50 shows since the age of 12, and having just returned from a weekend with his girlfriend at Outside Lands Music Festival in San Francisco, Hickey felt he was immediately able to recognize hazards in the layout.

“Nothing made sense,” says Hickey, 30, a California native earning a PhD in chemistry from the University of Houston. At Astroworld’s main stage, there were limited stanchions dividing the crowd and containing its movement, only one narrow aisle for security and medical personnel to access the center of the crowd, few water stations set up for patrons and limited exit points from the festival’s main venue. “You could tell right away that it wouldn’t hold the crowd,” he says.

With the countdown clock to Travis Scott’s headlining performance clicking closer to showtime, festival attendees at side stages watching the likes of artists including Yves Tumor and Don Toliver began compressing in from all angles on the already waiting and rowdy mainstage crowd. “One side was the stage, on the opposite end were concession stands, and the walls of crowds were pushing in from the sides,” says Mason Rodriguez, 23, who strategically found a position behind a tree for himself and his girlfriend once they recognized the show might get out of hand. “You were fenced in. There was no getting out,” he adds.


“We were super close,” says Jonathan Garza, 19, who was attending his first ever concert and arrived early with his girlfriend hoping to stake out a prime spot for Scott’s headline performance. “About an hour before the show even started, I had a gut feeling we should leave. Everyone was pushing and throwing things. When they started the 30-minute countdown at 8:30 p.m., everything went crazy. Just like that, we couldn’t move. We were stuck, we were scared and we knew we had to get out of there.”

As thousands jockeyed for position and a better view of the stage, the group of 50,000-plus swirled to form a precarious, mass of bodies, creating panic and causing a surge that has so far left hundreds injured and at least 10 dead, including 9-year-old Ezra Blount, who was watching the show from his father’s shoulders before the two were trampled. Many on hand believe breakdowns in security and failures in how the festival grounds were set up, especially the lack of signage, exits and clear paths for security and medical personnel, are largely to blame for the tragedy. As of press time, festival organizers did not return requests for comment.

“How is anyone able to respond if there's no way to access the people in the center?” says AJ Faber, co-owner of Tourniquet, which operates logistics, production and staffing for live concert events, and who has worked for more than a decade as tour manager for acts including The National and Grimes. “[The setup] clearly wasn’t enough. They did the minimum, but ideally it would be nice for there to be another corral for security between the sections,” she said, which would have divided the crowd into manageable quadrants.


Faber says a center aisle—which should be about 10-feet wide for two-way traffic so staff can move from front to back of house, and includes ledges long the rails to provide security a higher vantage and easy access to break up fights and offer emergency assistance in the crowd—is standard for events the size of Astroworld. Stanchions throughout a crowd also help limit the snowballing effect of a surge. “Split barricades effectively eliminate how far a rush can move,” she says. “If people start falling and eventually fall into a barricade, that sucks. You’ve avoided calamity. But at least they’re not smashing into 10,000 people, which is a much harder incident to deal with.”



Security breakdowns started early in the day, according to an activity log kept by the Houston Fire Department (HFD) and obtained by USA Today. As early as 8:15 a.m. Friday there were reports of lively crowds gathered at the security borders that prompted a police lieutenant to request riot gear, according to the log. There were at least 10 incidents of people breaking through the gates, including some participants using bolt cutters and approximately 150 people rushing the gate at Kirby and Westridge at 12:17 p.m.

“I heard a lot of side chit chat — people bragging about paying off security to get in for free,” Rodriguez says. “A lot of people who weren’t supposed to be there were, so I’m sure they were over capacity.” Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said during a press conference Saturday that the festival grounds could have handled “over 200,000” people, but festival organizers estimate at least 5,000 people without tickets found their way into the event.

Hickey said he saw numerous concertgoers without wristbands streaming unchecked through the front gates. He noted that, unlike other concerts he’s attended, no one was patted down. “People were carrying in flasks of liquor — you could actually see the bottle shapes in their pockets — and plenty of drugs.” Hickey said the merch area was chaotic, lacking staff to direct people or monitor lines. The deluge of people, unencumbered by standard security measures, created a situation where once people entered the main stage area, they were trapped.


From Hickey’s position in an accessible viewing area for disabled concert-goers near the back of the venue, he and his girlfriend were on a raised platform that offered them a bird’s-eye view of the scene. Before the concert started, Hickey watched as the space below filled to overflowing. “About 50 to 60 people climbed up the back of the projection screens and nobody stopped them,” he said. “There they were, two stories up on exposed electronics, and I didn’t see a single security guard tell them to get down.”

Hickey describes the concert as immediately out of control. “The entire time, people were trying to get out and other attendees were pulling them to safety over the back gates,” he says. “Everyone was desperate to get out. You could see their faces. They wanted no part of it.”

Hickey watched a paramedic perform CPR on a girl in front of his section. “It lasted about 30 minutes until the concert stopped because there was no way for anyone to pick her up and get her to an ambulance.” Hickey remembers that Travis stopped the concert “for a minute, one time, and only one time,” before telling the crowd to “Point your middle fingers to the sky” and returning to his performance. Other concert-goers suggested he paused the show at least three times.

On “CBS Mornings,” Travis Scott spokesperson Stephanie Rawlings-Blake pointed to the festival’s security operations plan, arguing that “it clearly says the only two people that are, have the authority to stop the concert, were the executive producer and the concert producer,” adding that Scott “was not responsible for this, but he wants to be responsible for the solution.”

Out of desperation, people began climbing over barriers into the section for disabled concert-goers, Hickey says, overcrowding the area. “Imagine people are pushing to the center from both sides. You can’t swim against that current to get out, so the only way out was to fight your way to the back,” he says. By concert’s end, he says he knew one thing: “There’s no way we’re ever doing this again. We were safer than anyone else at the concert and we still didn’t feel safe.”


Garza and his girlfriend weren't as lucky. Willing to forgo some of Friday’s earlier shows for a prime spot at Travis Scott’s headlining performance, the two walked over to the main stage four hours ahead of schedule, at roughly 5 p.m. They chose a location just to the left of center barricade, about four-people deep from a section at the front fenced off for VIPs. But before Scott even came to the stage they decided to leave and began forcing their way to the exit. “The crowds were pushing in on us, surging forward,” he says.

Garza only made it 10 steps before he fell. “I could see other people frantically trying to get out,” he says. “Melissa and I fell down to our knees, and people piled on top of us, all their weight on our legs. Our phones went flying and we got separated. At that point, I realized I was in trouble. I was starting to get frantic. There was no way for us to stay together, no way to communicate.”

Garza stood and started shoving against the crowd, tumbling again and a third time as he fought a current of bodies. “Twice, I landed on a pile of people, all of them screaming for help,” he said. “The first time, I was able to climb off. The second, I needed to be pulled off. I was losing energy.” The third time he fell, Garza said he was smothered by a mass who fell on top of him. “I could feel people walking over my arms and legs. I was struggling to breathe. I had nothing left.”

He fell one more time, landing on top of someone who was lying face down until someone grabbed him and pulled him up. “I’m embarrassed to say that I stepped on that other guy to get out,” Garza admits. “But I was 100 percent panicked. I thought I was going to die.”


Garza says it took him 30 minutes to navigate his way through the crowd. He describes a venue with no clear exits, no lights leading the way out. “I could barely breathe. It was hot, the place was filled with smoke, I couldn’t see. It was this feeling of being encased,” he says. “When I got to the gate, I folded over it and others pushed me [to safety]. I saw paramedics only after I got out.”

Looking through Astroworld’s 56-page security document, obtained by CNN, Faber says it’s limited in scope and seems “very randomly put together and kind of last minute,” compared with booklets and maps provided by Coachella and other festivals at which she’s worked throughout her career. Unlike concert venues, where security infrastructure is in place for every show and where security staff is often well-trained and full time, she says, security at festivals typically consists of people wanting to “catch a free show.”

Though the level of training Astroworld staff went through before the event is unclear, guard Darius Williams told TMZ that he felt unprepared given that he’d only earned the state’s level II security licensing requirement the night before during an open-book test, and said he felt even early on Friday morning that the event was understaffed. Faber says there’s often little-to-no instruction given to short-term security staff and few are given radios to call for help; they are often unable to answer basic questions; and they rarely even know the names of supervisors. The pat down process is often “theatrical,” she says, with minimal real effort to check bags.

In case of evacuation, Faber points to the Astroworld protocol document's promise that “Paths leading to the Main Entrance will be clearly marked, brightly lit and easily accessible for all guests of the festival.” Which is great, she says, but it only really offers staff ideas of what to do in an emergency without concrete plans of how to execute it. “Is there a map [describing how to evacuate]? How many paths? How wide are the paths? Are they one-way paths? That they're clearly marked is one thing, but are trained people helping to direct the traffic? Because there are 50,000-plus people and they're all showing up at the same time.”


Hickey said he never received a map of the venue, not when he purchased his tickets, nor when he arrived at the festival. He said he never saw anyone carrying a map and was in fact asked multiple times if he knew where the restrooms and water stations were.

Garza spent the length of Scott’s performance searching for his girlfriend, Melissa, outside the main venue. Without a map, he needed assistance to locate the medical tent. Once there, he wasn’t permitted to enter and begged a security guard to look for someone with Melissa’s build, hair and eye color. “The guard was overwhelmed, so I knew he wouldn’t be any help,” he said. “Then I saw a body being carried out and for a split second, I thought it might be Melissa.That was one of the worst experiences of my life.”

After the show, Garza returned to the spot where they’d been standing before the melee, saw Melissa, and called out to her. They ran into each other’s arms and for a long time, they just held each other. Garza says he can’t get over the lack of security presence and the lack of concern he witnessed from festival organizers, and from Scott. “At any time, he could have taken a breather and come back so people could get the help they needed. Everyone there was so unprepared.” Faber says artists typically will have an earpiece that allows festival staff to communicate issues to them via a talkback mic, but it’s unclear whether or not Scott or other performers on stage with him were wearing these types of devices.

When Rodriguez and his girlfriend eventually left the concert physically unscathed but emotionally distressed, they faced a mile-long walk to their car. It had been about 90 minutes since frantic 911 calls had been made from the festival grounds, begging for help for people who were being crushed and suffocated.

Only then, Rodriguez said, did they hear the sirens.