The FBI is asking Astroworld attendees to submit videos from festival
The Bureau is asking for “photos or videos” taken between 8:PM and 11:PM
The FBI has set up a new website and is now encouraging everyone who attended 2021’s Astroworld Festival to use it to submit photos and videos taken at the event.
The focus of the site is to ensure that every piece of evidence is looked at thoroughly as the festival now comes under intense investigation.
On November 5 last year, a crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival caused the deaths of 10 attendees and further injuries to hundreds more. Scott now faces multiple legal disputes as a result, as well as festival organisers Live Nation and ScoreMore.
In coordination with the Houston Police Department, the FBI is now asking for anyone who took videos at the event to send them into fbi.gov/astroworld - a newly launched site to collect all the evidence from the festival.
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“Houston Police Detectives have already viewed countless hours of video evidence as part of our ongoing investigation into the Astroworld event,” the administration said in a statement on Friday, January 14.
“To ensure that we have captured all possible evidence for a complete investigation, we have partnered with the Federal Bureau of Investigation for additional technical assistance.”
The Houston Police went on add that they were mostly interested in “photos or videos of the main arena” which were taken between 8:PM until 11:PM - around the time of the crowd surge.
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Former NYPD leitenant Dr. Darrin Porcher told The Rolling Stone following the statement that this call took "far too long” and should have happened immediately after the event.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand why this wasn’t done immediately, because they clearly understood the police department only has so many people. You’re conducting an investigation with 50,000 people at one location,” he said.
Porcher is currently working for a law firm representing over 700 Astroworld attendees, according to the former police lieutenant. While he doesn’t blame the Houston PD for not acting sooner, he added that the FBI have “a large field office in the Houston area” with plenty of resources.
“In the next couple of weeks, there will be a lot of information provided to prosecutors to establish that there was absolute criminal activity which occurred in this case.”
Gemma Ross is Mixmag's Digital Intern, follow her on Twitter