At 9:38pm Friday, a mass casualty incident was declared at a packed Travis Scott concert during the Astroworld Festival in Houston. Police and firefighters responded to the scene after multiple people were trampled and crushed, eight of them fatally, during a crowd surge. But Scott appeared to play his entire set, the Houston Chronicle reports, not leaving the stage until 10:15pm after performing all of his planned songs. Concert promoter Live Nation had agreed to cut the show short at 9:38—30 minutes or more after the crush started, according to witness accounts—but Houston's police chief told reporters they had to be careful, with the large size of the crowd, not to incite a riot by ending the show early, Fox News reports. Meanwhile, harrowing accounts of concert attendees, including some who tried in vain to bring attention to what was happening, have started being posted to social media. The latest:
- "There's somebody dead": Multiple videos (see one here, but be warned that it's difficult to watch) show a woman climbing a platform to beg camera operators to stop the show because people were dying in the crowd below. She has described her experience on Instagram (read her full account here), and claims the camera operators not only refused to help, one threatened to throw her from the 15-foot-high platform if she didn't get down.