Drake, Apple seek dismissal from Astroworld victims suits
Apple, Drake and other defendants targeted have asked a Harris County court to dismiss them from a sprawling lawsuit filed by victims of the 2021 Astroworld disaster.
A flood of new motions and documents filed in Harris County’s 11th Civil District since the end of 2023 show efforts by attorneys to define just who is responsible for the failures at the Travis Scott concert that killed 10 people and injured scores more.
At the same time, filings from the plaintiffs’ lawyers reveal expert testimony, expected to play a part in any upcoming trial, that employees from two concert’s organizers — NRG Park operator ASM Global and Live Nation — knew the expected crowd size would exceed safe levels days before the concert and failed to heed lessons learns from previous Travis Scott concerts in 2018 and 2019.
“It is an industry accepted principle that elements of crowd behavior can be predicted and that a crowd can be managed if handled properly,” wrote Larry Perkins, of Perkins Crowd Management Group, a consultant on crowd safety. “However, in the case of the Nov. 5, 2021, event, the festival was not properly planned and staffed resulting in the inability to manage the ingress and crowd flow.”
The planner failed to meet industry standard, he wrote.
Attorneys in the case, which includes 64 defendants and thousands of plaintiffs, are barred from talking to the media by a court-imposed gag order.
Motions to dismiss
The expert testimony was revealed in filings from one of the defendants, Apex Security Group, which has asked Judge Kristen Brauchle Hawkins to issue a summary judgment removing the company from the lawsuit.
In its motion, Apex’s attorney wrote none of the four expert witnesses hired by the defense said the company breached its duties or responsibilities.
Other defendants in the case, including Apple, which was hired to livestream the concert and the rapper, Drake, who performed alongside Travis Scott, have made similar motions to be excluded from the lawsuit.
In a March 8 filing, attorney for Drake, whose real name is Aubrey Drake Graham, said despite a meticulous complaint filed by the plaintiffs lawyers, developed over the course of two years, they did “not attribute any direct conduct, activity, omissions or obligations” to Drake that caused the disaster. The rapper performed for about 14 minutes, and only got on the stage after many of the injuries had already occurred, his attorney wrote. He was not involved in the planning of the festival, his attorney said, and was an invitee “much like the festival patrons.”
In its filings, Apple also said it didn’t have anything in to do with planning the concert.
“Apple’s involvement was limited to Travis Scott’s performance — one performance out of dozens during the planned two-day event,” Apple wrote, saying the plaintiffs lawyers didn’t have a “scintilla of evidence” to claim the concert was a joint venture between the tech company and Scott.
In a different motion, Apple also pushed back at a claim made by ASM that the tech giant was to blame to disaster because one of its livestream cameras “may have created obstructions that would have further reduced the usable square footage for accommodating the audience.”
Apple was contracted to livestream the concert on Nov. 2, 2021, just three days before the show, lawyers wrote.
Prior warnings
Two of the expert reports appear to show the concert’s planners were aware of the danger of dangerously large crowds long before the concert start.
One of the warnings came in 2019, after that year’s Astroworld concert.
In an after-action meeting following that show, Houston Police Department Executive Chief Larry Satterwhite said he had become concerned about the “safety of the kids up against the barricade of the stage.”
“Need more ways to the get to the middle of the crowd and get to the kids that have trouble in the middle of the crowd,” Satterwhite said, according to the report by Darell Darnell, another safety consultant.
“There were kids who were up against the barricade who were experiencing crowd crush and turning blue,” Satterwhite said.
Satterwhite would end up in the crowd during the 2021 concert and pulled some of the victims to safety, according to a 2023 report released by the Houston Police Department.
Darnell and Perkins’ reports also say that Seyth Boardman, one of the security directors of the festival, was aware that the estimated crowd capacity of the concert based on the available space, was a ratio of 1 person to every 5 square feet.
Boardman in a text message to other organizers wrote the density “doesn’t look great on paper,” according to the reports.
Industry safety standards for crowd size is a minimum 7 square feet per person, the experts wrote.
The experts also wrote that NRG and Live Nation “immediately lost control of the crowd” on the morning of the concert, failed to set up a unified command center, didn’t perform formal risk assessments before the concert and didn’t properly monitor the size and movement of the crowd throughout the day.
Third-party blame
Live Nation and other defendants, meanwhile, have sought to shift at least some of the blame of the tragedy on public entities at the concert.
In a November filing, the concert promoter and its affiliates motivated to have the city of Houston, its police and fire departments and the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation, named as “responsible third parties,” who bore a part of the blame for the disaster.
Live Nation’s lawyers wrote that the police department participated in the review of the 2019 concert, and that the agencies signed off on security and site plans prior to the show. The motion also cites the department’s own report on on the incident, highlighting times when officers said they “backed off” during the emergency, or used their own cell phones to records Scott or Drake as they performed.
The promoter’s attorney argued that, if a jury find a basis for damages against the company over the disaster, jurors should be allowed to consider the public agency’s role in it before declaring a judgment amount.
Court records don’t indicate any trial dates for Astroworld litigation, though Law360 in December reported a trial related to one of the concert-goer’s deaths could begin in May.
A hearing on the motions to dismiss is scheduled for April 1, according to court records.