More harrowing stories from Travis Scott’s deadly Astroworld concert have emerged — with fans recalling how they thought they were going to die and one calling the concert “a fight for survival.”
Jeffrey Schmidt, who went to the Houston show with his best friend Casey Wagner, told CNN he remembers how it became more and more difficult to breathe as the 30-minute timer onstage began counting down.
“Me and Casey decided to try our best to make our way out of the crowd slowly. Little did we know, all hell was about to break loose. People started to pass out and fall to the ground,” Schmidt told the network.
“Casey, I and other crowd members tried to hold back the crowd from trampling over them. But the force of the crowd was too powerful, and people started to topple on top of them including Casey and I,” he added.
The two pals soon became separated when they got stuck under piles of bodies among the 50,000 concertgoers — eight of whom died in the melee.
“At that moment, my mind went into full survival mode. All I could hear was people screaming and crying for help,” Schmidt told CNN. “I lost all hope and thought I was going to die right there because I could not get my legs out. I fought for my life.
“I thought I was never going to see my best friend again, life did not feel real,” he added.
Schmidt finally managed to escape the death trap and sought help from law enforcement officers, but he told the outlet that they initially did not take him seriously.
“I witnessed multiple people unconscious and unable to breathe, as people under me were crying for my help. But I physically could not help,” he said. “That is what traumatized me the most, that I could not help the people around me. I felt heartbroken for them and their families.”
Schmidt, who later reunited with Wagner, added: “This was not a concert, this was a fight for survival.”
Another concertgoer, who was attending her first music festival, also described how she struggled to breathe amid the surging crowd and thought she was about to die.
“I fell backwards and it felt like it was the end for me. To think that’s how I’ll die, I was so scared,” Selena Beltran told CNN. “I did not know what to do. It was all happening so fast, but so slow and I couldn’t react. I just screamed.”
She said she tried to help several people by taking turns performing CPR on them with a nurse she met at the scene.
“I was beginning to go into shock, although I was trying to keep my composure and not panic. It was terrifying. I felt like it was a nightmare,” she said. “I looked around and just saw people stare and others continuing to enjoy themselves as if these people meant nothing.”
She added: “It felt like there was little humanity in that crowd.”
A third concertgoer, Billy Nasser, told CNN that he also rendered assistance to people “fighting for their lives.”
“I picked some kid up and his eyes rolled to the back of his head, so I checked his pulse. I knew he was dead,” Nasser told the network. “I checked the people around me. And I just had to leave him there, there was nothing I could do. I had to keep going.”
Nasser, who works as a DJ, said he shouted at members of the crew to tell Scott to stop the festival, but said there weren’t enough staffers to handle the situation.
“There wasn’t enough security guards and there wasn’t enough EMTs and people helping out the crowd. The paramedics couldn’t even reach the crowd,” he said.
Meanwhile, the aunt of Houston high school student Brianna Rodriguez, 16, who was among the eight people who died in the disaster, assailed Scott’s team, saying they should have canceled the event earlier in the day after people leaped over barriers.
Iris Rodriguez, 38, told the US Sun that Brianna’s “devastated” parents, Ester and Osvaldo, can’t believe they lost their “princess,” who left behind two siblings, Xzavier, 10, and Gisselle, 13.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, what caused her death. We are waiting for the autopsy results,” Rodriguez told the news outlet.
“We were told that once she was in the ambulance, she didn’t have any pulse. But they tried to bring her back and in the hospital. They tried to do everything they could,” she said.
Rodriguez said she doesn’t want to directly blame Scott for Brianna’s death.
“He’s a father, you know. I would never want anything like this to happen to his babies,” she told the US Sun.
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