Travis Scott 'devastated' after eight dead and several injured in crowd surge during his set

ITV News Correspondent Robert Moore reports on the worst US concert disaster in nearly two decades

A 14 and 16-year-old are among eight people who died at a Texas music festival as the crowd surged toward the stage during a performance by rapper Travis Scott.

The tragedy unfolded on Friday at Astroworld, a two-day event in Houston, Texas, with an estimated 50,000 people in attendance - the second day of the festival has been cancelled.

When Scott emerged on stage, the crowd pushed forward and people started to get crushed.

Mayor Sylvester Turner said the victims are aged 14, 16, two 21-year-olds, two 23-year-olds, 27 and the age of the eighth victim is unknown.

He said 25 people were taken to hospital, and 13 people are still in hospital, including five under the age of 18.

He called the disaster “a tragedy on many different levels” and said it was too early to draw conclusions about what went wrong.

“It may well be that this tragedy is the result of unpredictable events, of circumstances coming together that couldn’t possibly have been avoided,” said Judge Lina Hidalgo, Harris County’s top elected official.

“But until we determine that, I will ask the tough questions.”

Scott said he was "absolutely devastated by what took place last night"

He pledged to give Houston police department his "total support" and work "together with the Houston community to heal and support the families in need.”

Experts who have studied deaths caused by crowd surges say they are often a result of density – too many people packed into a small space.

The crowd is often running either away from a perceived threat or toward something they want, such as a performer, before hitting a barrier.

People in the Houston crowd reported lots of pushing and shoving during the performances leading up to Scott’s set.

Then when Scott took the stage, the crowd seemed to rush to the front, trying to get closer to the stage, said Nick Johnson, a high school pupil who was at the concert with friends.

“Everyone was passing out around you, and everyone was trying to help each other. But you just couldn’t move. You couldn’t do anything. You can’t even pick your arms up,” he said. “It just got worse and worse.”

He said fans started to crush each other, and people started screaming. He said it felt like 100C in the crowd.

Scott seemed to be aware that something was going on in the crowd, but he might not have understood the severity of the situation, Johnson said.

On video posted to social media, Scott could be seen stopping the concert at one point and asking for aid for someone in the audience: “Security, somebody help real quick.”

Houston Police executive assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite, who was near the front of the crowd, said the surge “happened all at once”.

“Suddenly we had several people down on the ground, experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode,” Satterwhite said. “And so we immediately started doing CPR and moving people right then.”

Satterwhite said promoters quickly agreed to end the event “in the interest of public safety”.

Concertgoer Niaara Goods said as soon as Scott jumped on stage "it was like an energy took over and everything went haywire".

“All of a sudden, your ribs are being crushed. You have someone’s arm in your neck. You’re trying to breathe, but you can’t," she said.

Another concertgoer, Gerardo Abad-Garcia, said he was pressed so tightly into the crowd that he could not move his arms off his chest.

During Toliver’s performance, which came before Scott’s appearance, he started getting concerned for his safety.

“I just couldn’t breathe. I was being compressed,” he said. A security guard helped him and others climb a fence and get out.

He described the crowd during Scott’s set as a wave that was “going forward and backward”.

Some people lost their shoes, and the ground was littered with clothing and rubbish. He said some people tried to help those who were passed out on the ground, while other concertgoers seemed to ignore them and continued watching the show.

Scott, 29, one of music’s biggest young stars, founded the Astroworld Festival in 2018.

He is from Houston and has been nominated for eight Grammy Awards. He has a three-year-old daughter with reality start Kylie Jenner, who announced in September that she is pregnant with their second child.

The deadly surge caused the most deaths at a US concert since the 2003 Station nightclub fire that killed 100 people in Rhode Island. Eleven people died and about two dozen were injured in 1979 at a concert for The Who as thousands of fans tried to get into Cincinnati’s riverfront coliseum.