Videos shot at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival Friday night appears to show fans desperately trying to get the concert to stop, as the crush went on for about a half hour before the music was stopped, leaving at least eight people dead and scores more injured.
Scott apparently noticed an ambulance moving through the crowd, stopped performing for a few moments, then promised to “make this motherf**king ground shake,” and resumed the show. It’s unclear if he heard any of the crowd’s pleas.
Another 11-second post starts with a closeup of Houston police officers and medics attending to a fan on the ground, while the audio captures a line of Scott’s song.
The camera then shifts to show Scott on top of a platform above the crowd, glancing in the direction of the cops. The rapper then turns away, shimmying his hips as he dances, and the video goes back to the scene of the victim being treated.
A different video shows Scott standing on the same platform looking more intently at a group of security officers carrying an unconscious fan. It is unclear if the same victim was in both videos.
Another clip posted on Twitter showed people in the crowd shouting “Stop the show!” though it was unlikely the group could be heard on stage. Others circulating online showed crowd members begging camera crews to stop the show.
In a different post, makeup mogul and realty star Kylie Jenner, who is pregnant with her second child with Scott, posted a video scanning the crowd that clearly shows an ambulance making its way through thousands of fans. The post was apparently since deleted, but multiple copies were circulating online.
It’s still not clear what triggered the mayhem, though Houston Police said they are investigating “rumors” of someone sticking people with drugs. Officials said that the 50,000+ crowd began to surge forward around 9 p.m. as Scott took the stage, and within a half hour, the situation had turned deadly.
Social media after the tragedy filled with full of first-person stories from people who said they were caught up in the crushing crowd and witnessed multiple people getting hurt.
Billy Nasser, a 24-year-old DJ who was at the festival, told the Houston Chronicle that the crowd started surging during the show and people started falling down.
“Everyone in the front was getting crushed,” Nasser said. “The crowd was moving so hard, people were falling over and then tripping over the people on the ground.”
Nasser, who posted video of a man receiving chest compressions as a cart he is on moves through the crowd, said he tried helping up one kid who was on the floor. Some people kept dancing, seemingly not realizing what was happening. The kid he picked up stumbled around and fell on a pile of others.
Nasser told the paper he realized there was a pile building up, people likely dying, and he started panicking. “I have never seen anything like it,” he said. “I have been to so many festivals. I have never seen anything like this before.”