On this past Friday, November 5, 2021, Travis Scott had his annual concert, AstroWorld in
Houston, Texas yet this years’ concert would be one like no other in the past. To begin with, it was
found that the amount of people who were admitted into the AstroWorld festival was over the
maximum capacity. This raises a huge red flag as not only is it not safe to have that many people
in one confined space due to emergencies, but we are also still in a pandemic. If far more people
came to the event than expected, it should have been shut down quickly or some measure should
have taken place to decrease the amount of people in the audience. I witnessed in a live video
taken that day swarms of people jumping over gates and lines while tramping people who fell
during the process. In the video what caught my attention the most was the security that was
there were standing watching this take place instead of trying to show the running fans and those
who were being crushed to death. Fans were not only being trampled but they were also being
mushed within the packed crowd so much to the point that they lost conciseness and passed out.
Within the first thirty minutes after Travis Scott came out is when the first confirmed story of
someone passing out and dying was reported. While it was hard to get the immediate attention of
Travis Scott himself, several people in the crowd began screaming to the top of their lungs for
help. This, however, would be something that would continue for the rest of the night, with more
three hundred people being injured/passing out and eight confirmed people dying. It has been
caught on several videos of audience members screaming and having the attention of Travis’
team to inform them of the horrors happening in the audience, yet the screams, cries, and pleads
from the helpless fans were going ignored so that the show could continue. Unconscious bodies
were being crowd-surfed over to EMS as they were not able to get through due to how packed
the audience was. In a story by the Houston Chronicle written by Zach Despart, it was headlined,
“For 37 minutes after officials declared a ‘mass casualty’ at Astroworld, Travis Scott played on”.
Those thirty-seven minutes Travis Scott chose to continue with his show instead of stopping,
getting the festival safety evacuated and helping the hundreds of injured and unconscious fans.
During those thirty-seven minutes, lives could have been saved and people could have been
shielded from experiencing more trauma during that terrible night. While there is still a lot being
discovered about this frantic night, several lawsuits have been filed against Travis Scott in
connection with the AstroWorld festival that claimed the lives of eight people. The most recent
lawsuit was filed by the family of nine-year-old Ezra Blout who was trampled at the festival and
as a result, is currently in a coma. Many people expressed how they feel about this situation and
how the young boy should not have been to the concert anyway. My personal response to
Blount’s story is you cannot blame his family for taking him to a Travis Scott AstroWorld
concert as he has every right to go if he wants. Age does not matter when it comes to music and
creating experiences with your child, which is all his parents were trying to do. They did not go
there with the expectation of their young son being trampled, or I am sure they would not have
attended. My father attended his first Michael Jackson concert when he was eight years old, and
it is still one of his favorite memories to this day. My point is the fans who were victims, no
matter what age, are not the ones to blame in this situation, as they were just attending the
concert of an artist they loved. Put yourself in their shoes, if you were at your favorite artist’s
concert and what happened Friday night to hundreds of fans happened to you, would you want
people to blame you?