Amid the ongoing investigation into the stampede at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld music festival in Houston, where at least eight people were killed and several others injured, an Instagram post from one of the concert’s attendees has gone viral. Seanna Faith McCarty, one of the 50,000 people who attended the event, revealed unsettling details about the evening in the post.
“Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, people began to drown – in other people,” she said in her Facebook post, which has now received over one million likes. “The rush of people became tighter and tighter. Breathing became something only a few were capable of. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick, hot air.”
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McCarty and her friend were caught in the situation, and their attempts to flee the congested area were futile. “My friend began to gasp for breath and she told me we needed to get out. We tried. There was nowhere to go.”
McCarty and her friend were caught in the situation, and their attempts to flee the congested area were futile. “The screaming intensified as more people realised they couldn’t breathe. We begged security to help us, for the performer to see us and know something was wrong. No one came.”
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“We knew there was a very big chance some of us would not make it out alive.”
“There were people. Unconscious. Being trampled by every foot that slammed into the ground as each individual tried to keep themselves upright,” the post continued.
While McCarty and her friend struggled to maintain their balance, tipping over the crowd again and again, they were able to identify a cameraman on a high platform. According to the post, he, on the other hand, rejected McCarty’s frequent cries for help. “I climbed the ladder and pointed to the hole, telling him people were dying,” she wrote. “He told me to get off the platform and continued filming. I screamed over and over again. He wouldn’t even look in the direction, so I pushed the camera so it pointed toward where I had just come from.”
McCarty crawled beneath the platform and dialled 911, where she was told that a medical team was being dispatched. McCarty eventually came across two individuals wearing medical shirts and informed them of the problem.
“Those were the only ones working that were brave that night,” McCarty added in her post. “I had endless respect for those two men. We waited, the two girls and I, and watched people being thrown over the railing, people trying to escape the cage we had been in.”
