(Trends Wide) — TK Tellez knows that festivals can go crazy. But nothing, he says, could have prepared him for the tragedy that unfolded Friday night at the Astroworld Festival in Houston.
It began an hour before Travis Scott’s performance, while Tellez and his girlfriend stood near the stage hoping to get a better look at the rapper.
But even before Scott came out, things quickly turned ugly. The crowd advanced while Scott was on stage.
“The crowd got tighter and tighter, and at the time it was hard to breathe. When Travis came out performing his first song, I witnessed people swoon next to me,” Téllez, 20, told Trends Wide.
“We all screamed for help and no one helped us or listened to us. It was horrible. People were screaming for their lives and they couldn’t get out. No one could move a muscle.”
At least eight people were killed and dozens injured in the resulting crush which, according to people at the concert, apparently overwhelmed event staff and medical staff at NRG Park. The deceased were between 14 and 27 years old.
Concert goers described the event as traumatizing, with many witnesses saying they saw lifeless bodies trampled on amid the chaos. Those who survived had to fight their way through the crowd as the music continued to roar.
Here’s more of what Téllez and others witnessed:
‘It was the scariest sound I’ve ever heard’
People around Téllez began to fall, he said, at some point causing him to fall as well. People crowded on top of him, some losing consciousness.
“Everybody was crying; it was the scariest sound I’ve ever heard,” Téllez said. “Imagine hearing Travis Scott and people screaming for their lives at the same time.”
Despite his attempts and the efforts of others to give CPR to those who were not breathing, “there just weren’t enough people to help everyone,” he said.
TK Tellez was excited to see Travis Scott sing at Astroworld.
“Travis Scott had little time between songs and we screamed with all our vocal chords so someone could hear us, but no one would,” Téllez said. “This year’s festival will stick with me forever. I’ve never seen someone die in front of my eyes. It was horrible.”
‘I felt it was a nightmare’
Selena Beltran, who was attending her first music festival, found that everything around her began to tighten more and more as Scott made his way to the stage. Soon he struggled for breath.
She quickly lost sight of her four friends and, as the surrounding crowd began to jump, she lost her balance.
“I fell on my back and I felt like it was the end for me. To think this is how I’m going to die, I was so scared,” Beltran told Trends Wide. “I didn’t know what to do. Everything was happening so fast, but so slow and I couldn’t react. I just screamed.”
Despite seeing people who had clearly lost consciousness, Beltran said, people kept trampling those on the ground.
“I was surprised to see people act inconsiderate and savage. It was crazy to see so many run over others like they were wild animals,” he said. “People didn’t care, yet they tried to break through just to get to the front without thinking about the consequences and who it would affect.”
After someone helped her up, Beltran said, she tried to help four other people who fainted, taking turns performing CPR on them with a nurse she met from the crowd.
“I was starting to go into shock, even though I was trying to keep my composure and not panic. It was scary. I felt like it was a nightmare,” she said.
“I looked around and saw that people were staring and others were still having fun as if these people meant nothing. I felt there was little humanity in that crowd.”
Aerial view of the huge crowd at the Astroworld Festival.
Despite people’s shouts to “stop the show,” the music continued, Beltrán said. Other witnesses said Scott paused the presentation several times and eventually stopped.
At the end of the festival, Beltrán saw the bodies of the people he performed CPR on as doctors removed them, he said.
“I knew they had passed away,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep last night. The moment kept replaying in my mind over and over again.”
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‘Children fell from left to right’
Billy Nasser described the surge in crowds that killed eight people Friday night as a “death trap.”
Nasser said he was one of the concert goers who tried to help people who were being trampled while “fighting for their lives.”
“I picked up a boy and his eyes rolled so I checked his pulse. I knew he was dead,” Nasser said. “I checked the people around me. And I had to leave it there, there was nothing I could do. I had to move on.”
“The children were falling from left to right,” he said.
Nasser, who works as a DJ, said he just wanted the music to stop while people continued to party without “paying attention to the bodies falling behind them.”
Despite yelling at the camera and lighting technicians and asking them to alert Scott to halt the festival, Nasser said there were not enough personnel available to handle the situation.
“There were not enough security guards and there were not enough EMTs and people to help the crowd. The paramedics couldn’t even reach the crowd,” he said.
‘I felt like I was going to die’
Madeline Eskins said she didn’t think she could make it out alive when the deadly wave of people began.
“He started a countdown about 30 minutes before acting; he put a timer on the big screen,” Eskins, an ICU nurse, told Trends Wide of Scott’s presentation. “And all of a sudden, people were compressing against each other and pushing back and forth. As the timer got closer to zero, it just got worse and worse.”
Eskins described being squeezed in all directions and felt pressure on her chest and back. When she started having trouble breathing, she asked her boyfriend to tell his son that he loved him before losing consciousness.
“That happens, people rush onto the stage, it’s not a big deal,” Eskins said. “It’s uncomfortable, some get hurt, but this was crowded. I’ve never seen anything like this. I felt like I was going to die.”
After being taken to safety, Eskins used her medical expertise to help other concertgoers in distress, but said there were not enough supplies.
“There were so few resources. I mean the doctors who were there to help, many of them had not been properly trained,” Eskins said. “That doesn’t take away from what they were doing, they were still doing their best. They weren’t given adequate resources.”
At one point, he saw multiple people in cardiac arrest and the paramedic only had an automated external defibrillator (AED) and an Ambu bag, he said.
The main factor contributing to the tragic chaos, Eskins said, was overcrowding.
“I’ve been to concerts and, yeah, it gets tight, but I never felt like I was going to pass out,” he said. “I never saw people break down. I definitely never saw anyone die.”
‘I’ve never seen a show result in something like this’
Joey Guerra, who has covered the Houston music scene for about 10 years, had arrived at the festival in the early afternoon and saw a normal festive atmosphere throughout the day.
Ambulances arrive on the scene of the deadly crowd at the Astroworld Festival.
By the time Scott took the stage later that night, Guerra was behind the audience and saw small emergency vehicles cutting through the crowd, but “for a festival, it didn’t seem out of the ordinary.”
“You see a lot of things like that, people who are taken out of there because of exhaustion or dehydration or things like that,” Guerra told Trends Wide by phone Saturday morning. “He stopped the show, I mean three or four times when he noticed people in distress.”
Guerra said Scott performed for about 75 minutes before the festival stopped.
‘My mind went into total survival mode’
Jeffrey Schmidt and his best friend Casey Wagner were ready for the best weekend of their life. Instead, they found themselves fighting for their lives.
Schmidt said he remembers feeling like the night was getting worse as the 30-minute timer on stage began to count, and with each minute his breathing became more and more difficult.
Jeffrey Schmidt and Casey found themselves fighting for their lives at Astroworld.
“Casey and I decided to do our best to get out of the crowd slowly. Little did we know, all hell was about to break loose. People started to pass out and fall to the ground,” Schmidt told Trends Wide.
“Casey, myself, and other members of the crowd tried to keep the crowd from trampling on them. But the force of the crowd was too powerful and people started falling on top of them, including Casey and me.”
The two friends found themselves begging each other for help, but were quickly separated when they were trampled under piles of bodies, with Schmidt’s legs trapped underneath other downed concertgoers.
“At that point my mind went into total survival mode. All I could hear was people screaming and calling for help,” Schmidt said. “I lost all hope and thought I was going to die right there because I couldn’t get my legs out. I fought for my life.”
“I thought I would never see my best friend again, life didn’t feel real,” he said.
People commemorate the victims of the crowd by leaving flowers outside the NRG Park.
Eventually, he managed to emerge from the chaos and ran to law enforcement officers for help, but they initially did not take him seriously, he said. Schmidt and Wagner met later, and both were “terrified and traumatized,” he added.
“This was not a concert, it was a struggle to survive,” said Schmidt.
“I saw several people unconscious and unable to breathe, while the people below me were crying for my help. But physically I could not help. That is what traumatized me the most, that I could not help the people around me. I felt heartbroken. for them and their families. “
Trends Wide’s Jenn Selva and Fernando Alfonso III contributed to this report.
