Concertgoers describe the chaos

HOUSTON — Screaming. Suffocating. Panicked. Unconscious.

The concertgoers at a Houston music festival Friday night say they were shocked to witness how the event brewed into pandemonium that left at least eight people dead.

Rapper Travis Scott was the headliner for the soldout Astroworld Festival in NRG Park, which was attended by an estimated 50,000 people.

Here, some of them describe the chaos they’re still trying to understand.

Ariel Little of New York was in the middle of the crowd in a prime viewing spot with her husband for only a brief minute before she started to struggle.

It was in trying to escape the increasingly packed venue that the couple realized how dangerous it was becoming.

Little’s voice quivered with emotion as she described how small she felt gasping for air as she was battered by the crowd.

“My chest is in so much pain from people pushing and crushing — literally crushing — my chest and in my lungs. And all I can remember is just screaming for him. ‘I gotta get out! I gotta get out!’ And people weren’t moving,” Little said. “They thought it was a joke but it was like literally people dying.”

Her husband, Shawn, surveyed the scene quickly to find a way out.

“There was a lot of people in my section that were kind of like screaming and having panic attacks just because it felt almost as if you were under an elevator and the elevator was coming down on you and there was nothing you could do about it,” Shawn Little said.

Madeline Eskins is an intensive care unit nurse who said she was one of the festivalgoers who passed out as the mass of people pressed closer to the stage. She was taken to a slightly less crowded area for medical attention, where she woke up.

Eskins, 23, of Houston, said she then saw someone nearby who needed medical help, and she told them she was a nurse. When a security guard overheard her, he asked if she could start helping others, Eskins said.

“There was three people on the ground getting CPR and the most disorganized chaos that I have ever seen in my life,” Eskins said.