Tribune Web Desk
Chandigarh, November 7
An eyewitness to the Houston stampede used Instagram to give a sense of what happened on the night that eight people were killed and dozens wounded at a Travis Scott concert.
Seanna McCarty was at the concert with her friend. She explains how the crush of people led to panic.
“Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, people began to drown—in other people,” she said in an Instagram post. “The rush of people became tighter and tighter. Breathing became something only a few were capable of. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick, hot air.”
Soon, her friend began to gasp for air, she writes, and they decided to leave.
“There was nowhere to go,” she writes. “The shoving got harder and harder. If someone’s arms had been up, it was no longer possible to put it down.”
People began to cry for help, but none was forthcoming. Music continued, as did the shoving. People began to collapse, taking down others with them.
“It was like watching a Jenga tower topple,” she wrote. “Person after person were sucked down. You could not guess from which direction the shove of hundreds of people would come next. You were at the mercy of the wave.”
There was a floor of bodies, she writes. “Of men and women, below two layers of fallen people above them…. There were people. Unconscious. Being trampled by every foot that slammed into the ground as people tried to keep themselves upright.”
At one point McCarty manages to free herself from the melee and dashes to the raised platform with a camera facing the crowd. A video of this particular incident has apparently gone viral. The video shows a woman, reportedly McCarty, climbing onto the platform to ask the cameraman to “stop the music”.
“People are dying,” she says over and over in the video to an increasingly angry and unresponsive cameraman. She’s soon joined by a fellow concertgoer, who’s climbed the ladder leading to the platform to ask for help. “People are dying,” he repeats to no avail.
Help finally came in the form of two medics, called in to take away the people who’ve fallen.
At least two investigations, one of them criminal, were underway on Sunday into the deadly stampede at the Astroworld music festival. Officials in Houston said autopsies on Friday’s victims were being performed as soon as possible so their bodies could be returned to family members, with the identities of some of the dead expected to be released on Sunday.
The dead were young, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters on Saturday: two were aged 14 and 16, two were 21, another two were 23, with a seventh aged 27.
An eighth victim has yet to be identified, he added.
(The article is generated from The Tribune via feeds, The Chenab Times staff didn’t wrote this news.)
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