HOUSTON – The Houston Police Department released its final report on the Astroworld Festival that led to the death of 10 people nearly two years later.
The redacted report is 1,266 pages long. Portions of it include concertgoer witness interviews.
Seanna McCarti, a Texas A&M student, was at the concert. The report shows she was interviewed by detectives a month after the festival.
“Seanna was emotionally charged for this interview because a lot of time has passed since the incident and since the time, we were able to make contact with her. She voiced her frustration with police for not taking her statement earlier,” the report says.
McCarti went viral when cellphone video showed her climb one of the scaffoldings, pleading with a camera man to tell someone to stop the show.
“She stated that she made eye contact with this other person and explained to him that people were dying in the crowd, and she pointed to the area where she had come from,” the report said. “The person responded to her by saying, ‘get off the platform.’ She repeated to him that people were dying.”
She told authorities that wasn’t the response she expected and while climbing down the stairs she tried again, “she told the person one more time that people were dead in the crowd.”
McCarti could be seen on the same platform as Ayden Cruz. Cruz spoke with KPRC 2 Investigates for ‘Astroworld: Countdown to Tragedy.’
“The first time I went up, the people were like yelling at me,” Cruz said. “What is he doing? Get off. I was honestly a little discouraged because I knew I was going to be yelling and probably looking insane for a couple of seconds.”
Cruz attended the festival with Brianna Rodriguez. She was 16 years old, a junior at Heights High School and a member of the award-winning dance team and band.
Investigators also interviewed Christopher Gates, who attended the concert. He said he noticed people passing out “around the second or third song,” adding, “many people were dehydrated because there were only two free water distribution areas in the entire festival, and they were always accompanied by long lines.”
He too, like McCarti, tried getting the attention of people working the event. Eventually, he was able to call over a medic. He told investigators he saw one [medic] crying while doing CPR. One of the medics seemed to know what he was doing.
Gates “described the concert as a whole as absolute mayhem. He did not understand how no one else could hear them chanting “stop the show,” he felt like they were loud in spite of all the music and crowd noise,” the report said.
“The report, while important for the public to see, simply confirms what we already feared and have discovered in the course of the lawsuit: that the organizers and promoters of the concert failed to properly plan, valuing profitability over the obvious safety concerns that proved fatal,” said attorney Kevin Haynes, a partner at Kherkher Garcia, LLP, representing some of the victims.
KPRC 2′s Rilwan Balogun reached out to the victims’ families, concertgoers, and attorneys representing them. None of them were able to speak because a court issued a gag order preventing anyone from speaking publicly about the event.
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