Travis Scott & Other Astroworld Organizers Won’t Face Criminal Charges Over Deadly Crowd Crush

Bill Donahue
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A grand jury in Houston on Thursday (June 29) said that no criminal charges would be filed against Travis Scott or other organizers of the deadly Astroworld music festival.

Following a 19-month investigation, a grand jury found there was not enough evidence to support criminal charges against Scott or several other individuals involved in planning and operating the 2021 festival, during which a crowd crush disaster left 10 dead and hundreds physically injured.

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Announcing the decision at a press conference on Thursday (June 29), Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said investigators had tracked down “every piece of relevant evidence,” interviewing many witnesses and watching “thousands and thousands of hours” of video, before taking their findings to the grand jury.

“Our job is narrow. It is to determine if this tragedy, this absolutely disastrous, horrific event, involved criminal activity by anyone,” Ogg said. “In this instance, the grand jury found that no crime did occur — that no single individual was criminally responsible.”

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In a statement to Billboard, Scott’s lawyer, Kent Schaffer, said the decision not to bring charges “confirms what we have known all along – that Travis Scott is not responsible for the Astroworld tragedy.”

“This is consistent with investigative reporting by numerous media outlets and federal and state government reports that have squarely placed the onus for event safety crises on organizers, operators and contractors — not performers,” Schaffer said. “While waiting patiently for the District Attorney’s decision to not file charges, Travis Scott has been inaccurately and wrongly singled out, despite stopping the show three separate times and being unaware of the events as they were unfolding. Now that this chapter is closed, we hope for the government efforts to focus on what is most important — stopping future heartbreaking tragedies like Astroworld from ever occurring again.”

According to Ogg, the other individuals cleared of criminal charges on Thursday were Brent Silberstein, a veteran Houston concert promoter who served as a freelance operations manager; John Junell, a security executive at Live Nation; Shawna Boardman and Seyth Boardman, from the crowd management company Contemporary Services Corporation; and Emily Ockenden, an employee at operations company BWG who was listed as the first person to be contacted by emergency officials.

The decision against any criminal charges is a major win for Scott and the others facing them, but it won’t have any impact on the sprawling civil litigation that is currently underway to determine whether the Astroworld organizers should face civil liability over the disaster.

Thousands of alleged victims have filed more than 400 civil lawsuits against Scott, Live Nation and other organizers, claiming they were legally negligent in how they planned and conducted the event, including by failing to provide adequate security and emergency support. With the many cases now combined into a single large action, the alleged victims are seeking billions in damages.

The two sides are currently in the midst of what is known as discovery, the lengthy legal process in which each side hands over evidence to their opponents and takes depositions of key figures. A trial or multiple trials will eventually be held to decide the case, but such litigation often ends in large settlements.

At Thursday’s press conference, Ogg stressed that her criminal investigation and the grand jury determination were separate from the lawsuit: “What will happen in courts where they practice civil law,” she said, “is not for us to determine.”

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