9-Year-Old Astroworld Attendee Dies, Raising Death Toll to 10
A 9-year-old boy who was placed on life support after attending the Astroworld Festival in Houston has died, bringing the concert’s death toll to 10 people.
Ezra Blount died on Sunday, becoming the youngest person to die after going to the Nov. 5 concert with his dad Treston Blount. According to the family’s lawyers, Ezra was put in a medically induced coma after suffering “catastrophic” injuries to his brain, liver, and kidney.
“The Blount family tonight is grieving the incomprehensible loss of their precious young son. This should not have been the outcome of taking their son to a concert, what should have been a joyful celebration,” the Blount family’s lawyers Ben Crump, Alex Hilliard, Bob Hilliard, and Paul Grinke said in a joint statement.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner tweeted his condolences about Ezra’s death.
The family has launched a lawsuit against rapper Travis Scott, Scoremore Mgmt, and concert organizers Live Nation Entertainment, arguing they were negligent and failed to provide adequate medical attention and crowd control.
On Ezra’s crowdfunding campaign page, his father said Ezra had been on his shoulders awaiting an appearance from Drake.
“I began to be crushed until I couldn’t breathe,” Blount said. He said when he woke up, his son was gone, but due to the “trauma to nearly all organs, we are certain that he was trampled.”
He told ABC 13 Houston his son was “stoked” for the show and was a big fan of Scott.
“To see him in that condition, I just wasn’t ready for that,” he said.
Crump and Alex Hilliard held a news conference Friday announcing they were filing another 93 lawsuits on behalf of 200 Astroworld victims.
Speaking to CBS Mornings Friday, Scott’s spokesperson, former Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said only the executive producer and concert producer had the authority to stop the show.
“It was hours and hours after the concert when they actually found out the tragedy, how the tragedy unfolded," she said.
Scott’s lawyer Ed McPherson told ABC13 that he would have stopped the show if police had alerted him to the fact that it had become a “mass casualty event.”
McPherson said Scott couldn’t hear or see what was going on below—though video footage shows him acknowledging an ambulance in the crowd before saying he wanted to “make this motherfucking ground shake.”
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Manisha Krishnan, Khareem Sudlow
