Five Finger Death Punch Member Suffers Concerning Injury Mid-Show

Five Finger Death Punch frontman Ivan Moody claims his eye was injured after it was exposed to a laser beam during the band’s show on May 19 in Daytona Beach, Florida. The group was performing during the Welcome to Rockville festival. Moody, 42, joined the band in 2006 and has appeared on every album since their first, The Way of the First, in 2007.

On Thursday night, Moody shared a video with fans on Instagram, explaining exactly what happened, reports Blabber Mouth. He got “overheated” during the set and passed out. As he almost fell to the floor and moved towards drummer Charlie Egen’s kit, he could see that Egen was “almost passed” out as well because of the heat. He reached for Egen’s cymbals and could feel himself “going under.” He ran backstage and the crew helped him out. As he walked backstage, “one of the lasers kicked backward, ’cause I tripped basically over it, and it shot me in the eye,” Moody said in the since-deleted video. “And these things are like… they basically have the power of a minor supernova; they’re really bad. If you put your phone up to one of ’em, it’ll actually black out your screen.”

Moody told fans in the video he had to fly back to Las Vegas to see a “real eye doctor.” He could not see out of his eye at the moment he filmed the clip. “It’s, like, have you ever stared at the sun or a lightbulb and you get that green light – it blackens it out. Imagine that times, like, a thousand,” he said. “They thought my retina was separated; that’s how bad it was.”

The singer said he would probably be wearing an eyepatch when the band performs in Europe. Moody said he did not care if people made fun of him for wearing it. “It is what it is. I had a blast. Like I said, I’m really sorry. I felt like I got exhausted [during the Welcome To Rockville set] – the weight of the humidity,” Moody said. “Eighty-five percent humidity in 90-degree weather, it takes a toll. And I saw a lot of you falling down. And when I went to the ER, there were a lot of you out there.”

Although Moody deleted the video about the eye injury, he has shared updates. He published a clip of himself in the hospital, introducing his thousands of fans to the other patient in the ER with him and the nurse who held the patch to his eye. He also published a video with fans who were hospitalized because of the extreme heat during the concert.

Five Finger Death Punch will release their new album, AfterLife, in August. The album is the first without guitarist Jason Hook but includes Andy James as the replacement. The group’s current lineup includes guitarist Zoltan Bathory, bassist Chris Kael, James, Egan, and Moody. They will be headlining a tour beginning on Aug. 19 in Portland, Oregon, with Megadeth, The Hu, and Fire From The Gods joining them. The group is also planning to release a new version of their first album in late 2022.