Astroworld festival: critically injured victim dies, bringing death toll to nine
A 22-year-old college senior who was critically injured at the Astroworld festival in Houston has died, the family’s lawyer said on Thursday, taking the death toll to nine.
Bharti Shahani died on Wednesday, attorney James Lassiter said during a news conference.
Hundreds of others were injured in the melee on Friday night as the rapper Travis Scott took to the stage. A criminal investigation into the deaths at Astroworld is underway.
Family members told the Houston TV station KTRK that Shahani was studying electronics systems engineering at Texas A&M University and had been set to graduate next spring. Her cousin, Mohit Bellani, attended the festival with Shahani and said they were separated once the crowd began to surge forward.
“Once one person fell, people started toppling like dominos. It was like a sinkhole. People were falling on top of each other,” Bellani told KTRK.
Shahani was taken to the hospital where she was placed on a ventilator, family members said.
Scott was only minutes into his headlining show at the Astroworld music festival when at least one Houston officer radioed over a police channel that the main stage had been compromised by a massive crowd surge.
The police radio traffic from the Friday night concert, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, revealed how quickly law enforcement became aware of the rising danger in the throng of concertgoers shortly after the star rapper began performing at the soldout music festival, which drew about 50,000 people.
Hundreds of other fans were injured as a mass of bodies pressed toward the stage, and nearly a week later, at least one more person was still in critical condition, a nine-year-old boy placed in a medically induced coma.
Authorities have opened a criminal investigation but have not yet assigned any fault.
Scott took the stage in his hometown of Houston shortly after 9pm.
“Looks like folks are coming out of the crowd complaining of difficulty breathing, crushing-type injuries,” one official said over the police radio around 9.21pm, according to the audio obtained by the newspaper. “Seems like the crowd is compressing on itself.”
Scott kept performing his set, which lasted about an hour. His attorneys have said he did not know about the tragedy unfolding in the crowd until after the show. The newspaper reported that officers spotted people leaving the crowd but that their voices remained calm through the first half-hour.
“I’m at the medical tent,” one officer radioed in around 9.30pm. “There’s a lot of people trampled and they’re passed out at the front stage.”
Later, another officer says: “We’re getting multiple reports of people getting injured. We have another report of cardiac situation with CPR by the stage.”
The Houston police chief, Troy Finner, said on Wednesday that police told organizers to shut down the performance when fans in the crowd were administered CPR. Authorities gave word around 10.03pm that the concert was in the process of shutting down, but witnesses say Scott and Drake, the superstar rapper who came on toward the end of Scott’s set as a special guest, kept performing.
Finner repeatedly refused to provide timelines on Wednesday in his second press briefing since the tragedy, saying the case was still under investigation. He said more than 500 officers were working the festival, more than double the number assigned in 2019, the last time the festival was held.
But Finner said festival organizers had not provided clear records of how many private security guards were working the show, describing what they turned over as “just not good”. It was up to Live Nation Entertainment, the show’s promoter, to secure two mosh pits in front of the stage, Finner said.
Scott’s attorneys on Wednesday pointed to an operational plan for the event that states only the festival director and executive producers have the authority to stop the show, “neither of which is part of Travis’s crew”.