Astroworld: Travis Scott’s lawyer accuses officials of pushing ‘inconsistent messages’ about crowd surge

Rapper’s lawyer said that there has been “finger-pointing” from Houston City officials over crowd surge that killed eight

Travis Scott’s lawyer has claimed that there have been “inconsistent messages” from Houston officials about what happened at Astroworld Festival.

At least eight people died and hundreds more were injured in a crowd surge during the rapper’s headline performance at the Texas festival on Friday (5 November) night.

A nine-year-old boy is in a medically-induced coma following his injuries, and a 22-year-old student has been declared brain dead.

In a statement shared with People on Wednesday (10 November), Scott’s lawyer Edwin F McPherson accused city officials “who have sent inconsistent messages and have backtracked from original statements” of “finger-pointing”.

McPherson discussed comments made by Houston police chief Troy Finner earlier that day, who claimed that local officials did not have the power to end Scott’s performance at any point and that “the ultimate authority to end the show is with the production and the entertainer”.

“Finner was quoted in The New York Times as saying, ‘You cannot just close when you [have] got 50,000 and over 50,000 individuals. We have to worry about rioting, riots, when you have a group that’s that young,’” McPherson said.

“Yet, just a short time later, Chief Finner states the responsibility to stop the show falls on Travis.”

He continued: “It was reported that the Operations Plan designated that only the festival director and executive producers have authority to stop the show, neither of which is part of Travis’s crew. This also runs afoul of HPD’s [Houston Police Department] own previous actions when it shut down the power and sound at this very festival when the performance ran over 5 minutes back in 2019.”

McPherson added that “investigations should start proceeding over finger-pointing so that together, we can identify exactly what transpired and how we can prevent anything like this from happening again”.

Finner has previously said that he personally met with Scott on Friday before the festival started to “express my concerns regarding public safety” at Astroworld.

Two criminal investigations and more than 30 lawsuits are now probing what went wrong at the festival.

Scott reportedly was unaware of the tragedy occurring in the crowd and went to a pre-scheduled after-party at Dave & Buster’s after the event.

He has since said that he is “devastated” by the deaths and offered to pay the funeral costs for the eight victims who died and will issue a refund of all Astroworld 2021 tickets.