The message is clear: No bystanders at concerts. He even has a gold necklace mimicking a street sign: A jewel-encrusted red circle with a person standing still, a diagonal red slash through the body. The rapper, who dreamed of being a wrestler as a child and has said he wants his shows to resemble WWF matches, cheers chaos from the stage and stirs up frantic energy. Travis Scott's fans are dubbed "ragers" and are expected to be in constant motion at a show. "We gotta get out of here," he told his girlfriend. Every way out seemed impossible, but they eventually made their way to safety. They managed to get up, and Garcia said they screamed to nearby production staff for help but got no response. In an instant, both found themselves tangled on the ground in a pile of bodies. They felt the push and his left arm slipped away from her. Screams echoed, begging: "Please, help me!" Behind him, people were falling. The first shockwaves of fear emerged.Įligio Garcia, 18, of Corpus Christi, Texas, figures it was just 40 seconds into Scott's set that he looked at his girlfriend with concern. In the final 30 seconds on the clock, the craggy peaks of the stage's mountain turned to a volcano, and when the moment came, the crowd chanted: "Ten, nine, eight, seven, six. With five minutes left and latecomers pushing in, it tightened more. Some fans made a beeline for the stage built solely for the headliner, staking out positions they would hold for hours under the manufactured peaks of "Utopia Mountain."īy noon, a merchandise area was shut down because the crowd was out of control, according to Houston Fire Department logs, and by 5 p.m., as many as 5,000 people without festival wristbands were believed to have breached barricades, jumped fences and even used bolt cutters to make their way into the concert grounds.Īs afternoon turned to evening and the countdown clock appeared around 8:30 p.m., the crowd grew denser and denser, attendees said, and the first waves of motion began to ripple. Though the concert grounds hosted numerous acts, Scott, a Houston-born musician who founded the festival in 2018 on the heels of his chart-topping album "Astroworld," was undoubtedly the top draw.
The enthusiasm of some 50,000 spectators at the sold-out Astroworld festival was evident from the time gates opened hours earlier, when some of the earliest arrivals rushed through entrances with such force that metal detectors were toppled as security guards and police on horseback struggled to keep up. "You became an organism," said 26-year-old Steven Gutierrez of Ellenville, New York, who is 6-foot-2 and 391 pounds but nonetheless found himself struck by the power of the pushes that sent him drifting from his spot. But in the 70 minutes the headliner was on stage in a show that left nine dead, one thing was certain: Nearly everyone felt the waves of humanity, borne of excitement but soaked with risk, as they spread. What followed last Friday in Houston is clouded by unanswered questions and strikingly different experiences based on where someone stood, which swells of movement reached them, and how they handled the crush. Then, fighting the compression or seeking escape, people pushed from the front to the back, and new ripples came with it. In the thrill of the moment, clamoring for an idol, many pushed forward, thrusting revelers into revelers, closer and closer and closer, until it seemed every inch was swallowed. Leaping from darkness into the glow, rapper Travis Scott emerged, the instant for which tens of thousands gathered before him had waited. An image of an eagle in a fireball hovered above the stage, a neon red tunnel appeared and eight towers of flames rose to the sky.
Anticipation had been building for hours, but never more than now, as the red numerals on the countdown clock disappeared and the first synthesized notes vibrated.
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