Photo: Getty Images
Travis Scott's attorney released a statement on Wednesday (November 10) regarding the investigation into the Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas where at least eight people lost their lives and hundreds others were injured last week.
In the statement, the rapper's lawyer, Edwin F. McPherson, said city officials were doing a lot of "finger-pointing."
"There has been multiple finger-pointing, much of which has been by city officials, who have sent inconsistent messages and have backtracked from original statements," McPherson told Rolling Stone. "Houston Police Chief Troy Finner was quoted in the New York Times as saying 'You cannot just close when you got 50,000 and over 50,000 individuals. We have to worry about rioting, riots, when you have a group that's that young.' Yet, just a short time later, Chief Finner states the responsibility to stop the show falls on Travis."
McPherson also referenced the two-day festival's 56-page operations plan, obtained and first reported by CNN. The plan reportedly laid out who would've had authority to stop the show altogether –– the show's executive producer and festival organizer, "neither of which is part of Travis' crew," McPherson's statement added.
The document also reportedly didn't have a plan to deal with a potential crowd surge even though the 2019 Astroworld Festival left three people hospitalized after they were trampled.
"This also runs afoul of HPD's own previous actions when it shut down the power and sound at this very festival when the performance ran over 5 minutes back in 2019," McPherson noted.
"Investigations should start proceeding over finger-pointing so that together, we can identify exactly what transpired and how we can prevent anything like this from happening again."
Additionally, TMZ reported several police officers were caught on video recording Travis and Drake perform and seemed to be unaware of the chaos ensuing in the crowd. According to time stamps on a video taken by Alex Soto, the officers pulled out their phones at 10:02 p.m., over 20 minutes after the festival had been officially declared a "mass casualty event."
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