Families of Astroworld victims criticise Travis Scott following first interview since tragedy

"What he’s doing now is just causing people more pain"

The families of the victims from the Astroworld tragedy have criticised Travis Scott following his first interview since the event.

Ten people died as a result of the crowd crush that took place during Scott’s headline set at Astroworld on November 5 and earlier this week (December 9), Scott said he has a “responsibility to figure out what happened” in his first interview since the tragedy with Charlamagne Tha God.

Scott said: “I’ve been on different types of emotions, an emotional rollercoaster, I mean,” he said. “It gets so hard because, you know, I always feel connected with my fans. I went through something and I feel like fans went through something and people’s parents went through something.

“And it really hurts. It hurts the community, it hurts the city. There’s been a lot of thoughts, a lot of feelings, a lot of grieving, and just trying to wrap my head around it.”

Now, some of the families of the victims have responded to the interview.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, the lawyer for the family of Axel Acosta, who died at the festival, criticised Scott’s response. Tony Buzbee said: “You don’t get to punt back responsibility somewhere else. These are lessons we learn as children.

“If he said, ‘I might not be solely the problem, and I’m not solely responsible but that my conduct played a part,’ that doesn’t alleviate the families of their pain, but it at least doesn’t cause any more. What he’s doing now is just causing people more pain.”

In the interview, Scott claimed he couldn’t hear the pleas of his fans to stop the concert but briefly stopped the performance several times to check on fan’s welfare.

“I stopped it a couple of times to just make sure everybody was OK,” Scott said. “And I really just go off the fans’ energy as a collective — call and response. I just didn’t hear that.”

Jennifer Peña, whose sister Ruby died at the festival, said Scott should have been more active at stopping the festival set.

“There’s videos of people telling him to stop this concert, and he didn’t. How could he not know?” she continued. “I still think he’s guilty in some sense, in my opinion.”  “The first minute they told him to stop the concert early, he could have been like ‘Stop.’

He should have been like, ‘Okay,’ and then investigated what was happening,” Peña told Rolling Stone. “But he still continued. I think he could have avoided all of this. He could have stopped the concert and avoided all of this death,” she allleged.

Scott recently filed requests to be dismissed from multiple lawsuits levelled against him in the wake of the tragedy.

The rapper has been named in most of the nearly 300 suits filed in Harris County after 10 people died and hundreds more were injured last month when crowds rushed to the stage toward the start of Scott’s headline set.

The rapper has denied all the allegations set against him in 11 different lawsuits and his representative said that he will likely file more dismissal requests. Live Nation and its subsidiary ScoreMore, Astroworld’s promoters also denied in filed documents all the allegations against them.

It follows several victims’ families rejecting Scott’s offer to cover their loved ones’ funeral expenses.

Houston Police Department and claimants’ attorneys are continuing to gather information as part of their respective investigations into what went wrong at the festival, which will help them determine who is most culpable.

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