Astroworld is back in the news, and social media has some thoughts.
In November 2021, a deadly crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival claimed the lives of 10 people. The then-annual event, held in the rapper’s hometown of Houston, became one of the worst concert tragedies in U.S. history. Now it’s the subject of the new Netflix documentary Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy.
With renewed interest in the incident, survivors have taken to social media to share their own footage from the event.
“Only if I knew bro,” one attendee posted on TikTok over footage of himself in the crowd. The audio accompanying the clip is taken from the documentary: “It started getting pretty hectic,” one survivor says. “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t take a deep breath,’” adds another.
“Since everyone else is sharing their Astroworld experience,” another TikTok user wrote in the caption of a clip, which shows him tightly packed in the crowd as Scott performs. “Not too long after this I got bumped into due to the crowd swaying and ended up falling on top of someone in the fetal position,” he wrote. “We ended up getting out but man it was a struggle.”
In other horrifying footage, the panicked audience can be heard calling for help. “I’ve never posted this video before, rest in peace to all innocent lives lost,” the caption reads over the video.
Even before Scott took the stage, the crowd seemed to sense something was wrong. “We are gonna die,” one attendee filming the unsafe conditions “jokes” in a clip that now has 10.3 million views. “Saying this as a joke but on the inside this was a real feeling,” she wrote in the closed captions. “This about to be bad when it starts,” another can be heard saying. “Bro literally called it,” the captions add.
“I believe Astroworld 2021 was not an accident,” crowd safety expert Scott Davidson says in the new documentary. “It was an inevitability due to the lack of foresight and the abandonment of basic safety protocols.” Nearly 5,000 people were injured as a result of the crush. The Netflix documentary, which premiered on June 10, features interviews with several survivors.
In total, 10 people died: Axel Acosta, Danish Baig, Rudy Peña, Madison Dubiski, Franco Patiño, Jacob Jurinek, John Hilgert, Bharti Shahani, Brianna Rodriguez, and Ezra Blount. Blount was just 9 years old.
The cause of death for all 10 victims was compression asphyxiation.
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