Nine wrongful death lawsuits settled related to 2021 Astroworld crowd surge

All but one of the wrongful death lawsuits that have been filed in the wake of the 2021 crowd surge at the Astroworld festival, in which 10 people were killed, have been settled, lawyers for the festival’s promoter have revealed.

Neal Manne, an attorney for Live Nation, which was among those being sued, told a court on Wednesday that nine cases had been settled. Only the claim for wrongful death relating to the youngest person who died, Ezra Blount, nine, remains pending.

News of the settlements came as jury selection had been about to begin in the suit filed by the family of Madison Dubiski, 23, one of the 10 killed. Details of the settlement in this and the other cases are being kept sealed by order of the court.

The disaster happened on 5 November 2021 at an Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas, headlined by the rap star Travis Scott. A stampede occurred within the 50,000-strong crowd, leading to a crush in which up to 300 festival-goers were injured.

Some spectators said they were so tightly packed in the crush they couldn’t move their arms or breathe.

The 10 who died, aged from nine to 27, were killed by compression asphyxia, which has been compared to being crushed by a car.

A month after the stampede, the medical examiner for Harris county ruled that the 10 deaths had been accidental. Last June a grand jury declined to indict Scott and five other people including the manager of the festival.

An official investigation into the disaster later found that festival workers had sounded the alarm over the safety of the crowd while the performance was ongoing, but the message had failed to get through. A 56-page plan for how to respond to potential crises had been prepared for the event, spanning gun rampages, bombings, terrorist threats and extreme weather – but the information did not cover what to do in the event of a crowd surge.