Details on the tragedy at the Astroworld music festival are coming to light, including the identities of the eight people who died at the concert. According to a report by The Daily Beast, two of the victims were teenagers, ages 14 and 16 years old. The loved ones of these people are sharing their stories with the public as they mourn.
At least 8 people died and over 300 were injured on Friday night at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Houston, Texas. The crowd was densely packed, and it bypassed security while rushing the stage and trampling each other, though the cause of death of the eight victims has not yet been revealed. However, we do know that one of them was 14-year-old John Hilgert. Hilgert was a freshman at Memorial High School in Houston, which put out a statement published by ABC13 News.
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“Our hearts go out to the student’s family and to his friends and our staff at Memorial. This is a terrible loss, and the entire MHS family is grieving today,” it read. Hilgert was reportedly a passionate baseball player with big ambitions. He attended the concert with friends, including Hendrix Faulkner.
Hendrix’s mother Tracy Faulkner told The Houston Chronicle that Hilgert was “a good student and athlete and so polite. He was the sweetest and smartest young man. Everything about that night was a tragedy.”
Fellow concertgoer 16-year-old Brianna Rodriguez also died at the concert, her family confirmed to reporters from PEOPLE. They also set up a GoFundMe page in the hopes of helping to cover her funeral costs. It notes that Rodriguez was a “beautiful, vibrant” person. A high school junior and a dancer, the webpage says that “now she’s dancing her way to heaven’s pearly gates.”
Houston officials say that all eight of the victims range in age from 14 to 27, which has commenters casting further doubt on the unconfirmed implication that all of them died of cardiac arrest. One of the victims still remains unidentified, and officials released an image of his remains on Saturday in the hopes of finding his family. He is believed to be in his early 20s, is 6 feet, 2 inches tall and weighs 498 pounds.
Meanwhile, the investigation into all the factors that lead to this “mass casualty event” carries on, and it doesn’t seem like any single factor will be identified. Fans have criticized Scott for continuing his set even after emergency vehicles drove into the crowd to extract bodies and injured people, but the rapper claimed on his Instagram Story on Saturday night that he did not realize the weight of the situation. Attendees to The Daily Beast that the festival seemed poorly planned, overpacked and that the medical staff seemed poorly trained, with some unable to even perform CPR or take a pulse. Scott has promised his full cooperation and support to the Houston police.
