8 Dead After ‘Panic’ During Travis Scott Performance At Houston Astroworld

Eight people were killed on Friday night during rapper Travis Scott’s sold-out performance at the Astroworld music festival in Houston.

Fire Chief Samuel Peña said in a press conference that the events unfolded Friday at around 9:15 p.m. local time (10:15 p.m. ET) when “the crowd began to compress toward the front of the stage.”

“That caused some panic, and it started causing some injuries. People began to fall out, become unconscious, and it created additional panic,” he said, adding that the cause of death for the eight victims is not yet known at this time.

Officials said that seventeen people were rushed to the hospital from the concert, with 11 who were taken by ambulance being in cardiac arrest. Over 300 other people were treated throughout the event Friday at an on-site field hospital.

Around 50,000 people went to the festival at NRG Park, which was hosted by Scott, who said that he is “absolutely devastated” by what happened.

“My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival,” he said in a statement released on Saturday. “Houston PD has my total support as they continue to look into the tragic loss of life.”

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Though the festival was scheduled to go for two days, Saturday’s lineup has been canceled. 21-year-old concert-goer Alleighya Odom told NBC News that the tightly-packed crowd “was like this force on my back, this continuous force.”

“It was scary, like, genuinely,” she said. “I started looking around, and there’s people on the ground. There’s people looking at me, like, scared, eyes wild, like, ‘Please help me.’ There’s people behind me crying because they’re being stepped on.”

Odom, who had been going to this event since 2018, added that she moved to a less crowded area because she has a broken ankle and feared injuring it further. She also said that she didn’t realize the severity of the situation until she saw frantic messages from her mother asking if she was safe.

“It’s just crazy,” she said.

Houston Police Department Executive Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite, who was near the front of the concert, said that the situation unraveled quickly.

“It seems like it happened with just over the course of a few minutes — suddenly we had several people down on the ground experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode,” he said. “We immediately started doing CPR.”

Houston Police Chief Troy Finner told reporters that there were “a lot of rumors going around” about the incident, including “rumors of people injecting some people with drugs.”