On November 5, 2021, a fatal crowd crush occurred during the Astroworld Festival, a one time tour hosted by American rapper Travis Scott at NRG Park in Houston, Texas. Eight people were pronounced dead on the day of the incident, and two more died in the hospital in the following days. The Harris County medical examiner's office declared the cause of death to be compressive asphyxiation while the manner of death was ruled an accident.
Numerous lawsuits have been filed against Scott, Live Nation, and other parties involved, with allegations of negligence and failure to ensure the safety of attendees. On June 29, 2023, a Texas grand jury declined to indict Scott or anyone associated with the concert.
Background
American rapper Travis Scott founded the annual Astroworld Festival music event in 2018, taking its name from his third studio album that was released the same year. Astroworld 2021 was organized and managed by Live Nation and its affiliates. Apple Music would live-stream Scott's performance.
Logistics
The 2021 festival was to be held over two consecutive nights. Tickets sold out in under an hour after going on sale in May. Over 100,000 people were expected to attend. Authorities planned to limit first-night attendees to 70,000. Later, attendee numbers were further reduced to 50,000, although city fire codes permitted up to 200,000 people. The city of Houston and Harris County organized security for the event. Then Mayor of Houston Sylvester Turner stated more than 1,000 security staff and police were present; the exact number of police was estimated at 530, more than double the number at 2019's Astroworld event, with only about 240 police officers.
NRG Park, which is owned and managed by Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation (HCSCC), had significantly expanded its operation compared with those of prior festivals. Houston Police Department (HPD) Chief Troy Finner said on November 10 his department had no part in the writing or agreements of the original contract. NRG Park staff had asked HPD to close two major thoroughfares outside the festival's site beginning November 3 to prevent stampedes; as of November 10, there was no confirmation the request was granted.
Warning signs
Weeks before the festival, NRG's Park's General Manager Mark Miller noted repeated concerns about the "ratio of guests to staff". Live Nation subsidiary ScoreMore Shows offered to remedy this by providing more staff. Exclusivity agreements for NRG Park prevented the county from using services other than those offered by Contemporary Services Corporation (CSC). As a result, on November 4, Harris County officials signed an amendment to the contract with ScoreMore providing more staff. Showrunners Live Nation and ScoreMore contracted Seyth Boardman, co-founder of live-entertainment risk-management company B3 Risk Solutions, for Astroworld as its safety-and-risk director; Boardman was also a longtime manager at CSC, resulting in conflicts of interest on budgetary issues, staffing, and security protocol.
The initial version of the event-operations plan prepared by ScoreMore contained eventualities such as deaths, traumatic injuries, severe weather, an active shooter, civil unrest, lost persons, missing children, and unruly fans. It did not contain plans for crowd surges or mosh pit safety. Additionally, prior incidents such as a gate breach at the prior Astroworld Festival and security issues at Scott's concerts were not specifically addressed. Despite reports of subsequent revisions, HCSCC said it had not obtained the revisions prior to the event. Early attendees recalled witnessing a confusing layout with inadequate signage, poor lighting, lack of adequate water stations, lack of exits, 100-foot-wide (30 m) quadrants conducive to severe and unmanageable crowd surges, and access aisles too narrow for security and medical staff; these accounts were later corroborated by experts.
According to a lawsuit against Apple Music, the streamer's camera team and equipment split the premises horizontally and vertically. The lawsuit alleged the decision compromised concertgoers' means of egress and evacuation in favor of better vantage points for the cameras.
Houston Police Department said it had 528 on-duty officers at the festival, including 367 for the night shift and 161 held over from the day. According to early reporting, Live Nation provided another 755 security officers. These totals were later called into question, with no secondary verification of these numbers. HPD Chief Troy Finner disputed Live Nation's totals; he described record-keeping from the subsidiaries under their purview as "not good". Paramedic cover was provided by ParaDocs Worldwide, a contractor from Brooklyn, New York, that established a main medical tent and smaller aid stations around the venue.
According to early reporting, Houston Fire Department (HFD) stationed 20 ambulances outside the venue ahead of the concert. Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association (HPFFA) President Marty Lancton later disputed that total, saying none of his personnel were inside the venue because it was owned by the county and that the HPFFA had only four staff members on standby outside.
Timeline
Build-up
At 5:00 a.m., fans began to line up at the festival's outer perimeter. At 7:00 a.m., HFD and HPD set up their command post in the Orange Lot, more than 1 mile (1.6 km) east of the festival main stage. In the planning documents, a second incident command post in the Purple Lot was outlined. HFD chief Sam Peña stated he was not aware of the second command post and no firefighters were posted there.
At 8:15 a.m., HFD received a call from a police lieutenant requesting riot gear due to the crowd's behavior at the security perimeter. At 9:00 a.m, some attendees waiting in line were throwing trash at each other, crowd surfing and surging toward the grounds' outer barriers. From approximately 9:15 a.m. to 9:45 a.m., numerous checkpoints, including the festival's main-entrance gate and a COVID-19-testing site were breached and bypassed prior to the grounds' first opening at 10 a.m., with no immediate evidence of recovery or the number of people who entered. A security guard was injured and medics attended to four more people.
Around 9:30 a.m., associates of HFD Assistant Chief and event-emergency designee Michelle McLeod and the Chief of the closest fire district, Section 21 said the latter were denied venue access for a preparatory dry run of NRG Park by an employee at Contemporary Services Corporation, and again by their head of security, who gave the District Chief only a map to compensate. McLeod's request for radios was also denied, later supplanted with a cellphone number, which ScoreMore's plans indicated would be slow and unreliable due to extra network traffic.
At approximately 10:00 a.m., a crowd attempted to pull down barricades and rush a checkpoint, and ignited small fireworks. A girl was trampled and her foot became stuck between the metal bars of a barricade; a police officer responded by discharging his TASER into the sky. Several injured concertgoers were taken to the hospital that morning, a process that continued throughout the afternoon. Starting at 11:00 a.m., according to HFD logs, crowds at both lines for merchandise vendors became volatile, causing one to shut down by 12:00 p.m. to avoid endangering both those waiting and those working their tables.
At 12:17 p.m., staff lost control of another checkpoint and the fence in the Green Lot was damaged by an individual using bolt cutters. By 2:00 p.m. a VIP entrance completely broke down after at least 200 fans surged through its barricades and checkpoints, knocking over metal detectors and trampling several attendees. At least one person was injured and by 2:30 p.m., at least six were detained for trespassing. According to multiple eyewitness accounts, authority figures at the entrances or on the grounds abandoned wristbanding, pat-downs, and directional posts, and later that night alcohol and drugs were seen in the possession of numerous attendees, especially in the merchandise section.
By about 3:15 p.m., HPD started to report dangerous crowd conditions. At 3:54 p.m., according to ParaDocs' logs, medics had treated at least 54 patients and crowd conditions were getting dangerous. At approximately 4:15 p.m., around 150 people broke and breached another gate. At 4:30 p.m., several eyewitnesses described injuries from several attendees attempting to climb over barricades to escape crowd compression and mosh pits at the festival's secondary stage where Don Toliver was performing.
Between approximately 4 p.m. and 5 p.m., a meeting took place in Travis Scott's trailer that included Chief Finner, Scott, and Scott's personal security manager Michael Brown. Finner said he relayed concerns about the unruly crowd, advised Scott's team to be cautious about their messaging on social media, and urged awareness of social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. Finner also advised Brown to contact his department in advance. He then thanked Scott for his support of Houston. According to Scott's lawyer, neither security nor best practices were discussed, characterizing the conversation as a brief one to only wish Scott well.
At 6:55 p.m., HFD logged more than 100 people rushing the VIP gate, which was already heavily damaged from its breach four hours earlier. Fifteen guards were moved from the main gate to the corridor between the front barricade and the main stage in order to escort anyone not allowed there from that zone; supervisors did not provide headsets to receive instruction nor radios for communication. By 7:00 p.m., an attendee said she was being pressed against barricades at the main stage. By 8:39 p.m., security lifted at least five fans over pen barricades near the Chills stage. Around this time, a video from a member of the crowd showed a person calling for help and security assisting another as they were examined.
Scott was set to perform on the first night of the Astroworld Festival, with a countdown timer appearing thirty minutes before his set. Attendees cited by the Houston Chronicle, CNN, and ABC News said that as crowds from the last three of eight guest artists' concerts for Yves Tumor, Don Toliver and SZA at the grounds' only other stage, 'Thrills', finished prior to Scott's countdown, they boxed-in the crowd already waiting front-and-center at the 'Chills' stage solely being used that day for Scott's performance. With barriers, then the sound and lighting stands, followed by concessions just behind that initial crowd directly in front, they were left with nowhere to escape, and compression worsened until breathing became difficult.
An EMT dealing with an expected influx of people seeking medical help for overdoses said their understaffed medical teams became overwhelmed with traumatic injuries by 8:15 p.m. and they had to stop documenting patients and start triage. After running out of medical equipment and naloxone, treatment was delayed by at least 20 minutes for many unconscious patients. Some medics on-hire who were not trained in CPR had to seek out audience members who were, but gave up because the crowds were too tightly packed for the procedure to be properly implemented.
According to HPD logs, by approximately 8:52 p.m. nearly 300 people had been treated, which ParaDocs CEO Pollak later said was not unusual in his practice for a crowd that size; he mentioned only two transports to hospitals by that point, which he described as a minimal total in comparison to his past work. An EMT told The Washington Post he had heard on his radio from other staff that people were being trampled as early as 9:00 p.m., having overheard discussions to shut down the concert early. He did not know why the show continued, deciding with several colleagues it was too dangerous to enter the crush and attempt to help the injured. Event organizers had estimated HPD had logged 5,000 non-ticket holders entering the venue after the various breaches, with an approximate 55,000 total in attendance at 9:02 p.m. that night. NRG Park Manager Miller later told HCSCC Chairman of the Board Edgar Colón in a meeting on November 17 Live Nation's scanner report indicated only 37,858 attendees with scanned tickets on the property.