A concertgoer who attended Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival has been declared brain dead after suffering injuries during the crowd surge that killed eight people and injured over 300 people.
Bharti Shahani, a 22-year-old student attended the festival at NRG Park in Houston, Texas with her sister and cousin before getting separated in the crowd.
Bharti’s cousin, Mohit Bellani narrating what happened said: “Once one person fell, people started toppling like dominos. It was like a sinkhole. People were falling on top of each other. There were like layers of bodies on the ground, like two people thick. We were fighting to come up to the top and breathe to stay alive”.
After getting out of the stampede, both Bellani and Bharti’s sister, Namrata Shahani, lost their cell phones and couldn’t find Bharti.
Namrata disclosed that once they let go of Bharti’s hand, the next time they saw her was in the ER.
According to reports, Bharti was given CPR in an ambulance by first responders and taken to Houston Methodist Hospital. She has been in critical condition and on a ventilator since the night of the concert, with doctors telling the family she has no brain activity.
Bharti’s family said they were still determining what to do next. However, Bharti’s sister has set up a GoFundMe page for donations to cover the family’s mounting expenses.
Meanwhile, Scott and the organizers of the Houston festival are facing over 30 lawsuits related to the crowd surge.
Among those suing Scott and festival organizers is the family of 21-year-old Axel Acosta. An attorney for the family told a press conference on Monday that Acosta had the “life squeezed out of” him and was then “trampled on like a piece of trash”.
Astroworld emergency plan “did not include crowd surge measures”
According to investigators, the Astroworld festival had an emergency operational plan that accounted for a number of dangerous scenarios including an active shooter, bomb, or terrorist threat, but it did not include any information on what to do in the event of a crowd surge.
Authorities are currently reviewing whether the concert promoters and organizers adhered to the plan submitted.
On the heels of reports that drug use could have played a role in the deadly crowd surge at Astroworld on Friday, concertgoers have said they were certainly aware of rampant drug use across the festival.
A festival attendee, Ashley Chapa was quoted as saying to CBS affiliate KHOU: “There was a lot of drugs. At one point, we were leaving the smaller stage where all the smaller artists were playing and were walking to Travis Scott, and we passed by this man with a Snapchat screen, and they wrote the text on there and it said, ‘LSD for 15 dollars’. Obviously, little kids, young people, were there and they’d be, like, ‘Oh, I’ve never tried this before, let’s try it”.
Houston Police also suspects drug use may have been a factor for the crowd surge and has involved its narcotics division in the two criminal investigations opened into the tragedy.
‘Satanic panic’ conspiracy theories allege festival tragedy was ‘demonic’ sacrifice
The Astroworld tragedy has sparked a torrent of conspiracy theories across every social media platform, from the spurious claim that Travis Scott’s management company deliberately planned the mass casualty event to a bizarre anti-vax theory.
The most popular of these conspiracies is that the tragic death of eight young people at NRG Park last Friday was a Satanic ritual, with TikTok clips promoting the claim, having collectively racked up tens of millions of views.
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