Civil cases and investigations into the safety standards adopted at Astroworld 2021 remain open, the rapper will perform in Milan tonight.
Photo: Rick Kern/Getty Images
Travis Scott and the organizers of Astroworld will not face criminal trial for the deaths of 10 people at the 2021 festival. This was decided yesterday by a grand jury assembled in Houston, Texas, the city where the event was held.
In addition to the 10 dead, there were hundreds injured in the third edition of the festival in a stampede when some of the audience who saw SZA moved under Scott’s stage, where there were already a lot of people. “To be clear, there was no rush to the stage,” one of the investigators said. “It was a slow compaction or narrowing in that quadrant, causing people to fall.” It was November 5, 2021. Scott only interrupted the set briefly before continuing on and on for an hour, and for this and other reasons he was heavily criticized.
In addition to the rapper, festival manager Brent Silberstein, John Junell of Live Nation, security executives Sate and Shauna Boardman, and Emily Okenden, an employee at event production company BWG, escaped criminal charges.
According to Scott’s attorney Kent Shaffer, the decision “reaffirms what we knew from the beginning: Travis Scott is not responsible for the Astroworld tragedy.” The rapper, according to the lawyer, “interrupted the show three times and didn’t know what happened. Now that this chapter is closed, let’s hope that efforts will be focused on what matters most: preventing tragedies like Astroworld from happening again in the future.”
However, District Attorney Kim Ogg explained in a press conference that “our task was very specific: to establish whether the tragedy, this catastrophic and terrible event, was connected with criminal activity.” No “evidence of criminal conduct beyond reasonable doubt” was found.
However, at least two questions remain open. Houston police and federal officials are looking into whether sufficient security measures were in place at the 2021 festival. In addition, Scott and the organizers may have to pay millions, if not billions of dollars, to hundreds of victims who have sought redress, whose claims are being consolidated into mega-civil lawsuits.
Travis Scott will perform on I-Days tonight at the SNAI La Maura Racecourse in Milan.