Travis Scott’s lawyer is pointing out inconsistencies in the Houston police chief’s statements around the tragic deaths at Astroworld on Friday night, while calling for an end to “finger-pointing” and a focus on investigating what went wrong.
In a statement sent out Wednesday night (Nov. 10), attorney Edwin F. McPherson of McPherson LLP said, “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.”
He continued to cite Houston Chief of Police Troy Finner’s recent interview with The New York Times were he said the police department did not shut down the festival out of concern fans might riot. “Yet, just a short time later, Chief Finner states the responsibility to stop the show falls on Travis,” McPherson said — not the Houston Police Department.
“It was reported that the Operations Plan designated that only the festival director and executive producers have authority to stop the show, neither of which is part of Travis’s crew,” McPherson said. “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 has experience with similar sorts of cases. In 2003, he represented the surviving members of Great White against wrongful death lawsuits after the rock band’s performance in a Rhode Island nightclub erupted in a fire that killed 99 people.
Scott has commented twice so far on the eight deaths and hundreds of injuries that occurred during crowd surges at his Astroworld festival on Friday, but this is the first time anyone from his camp has publicly responded directly to accusations that the rapper might be to blame for them. The event is produced by Live Nation and the local promoter ScoreMore, of which it owns a majority share.
“Investigations should start proceeding over finger-pointing,” said McPherson, “so that together, we can identify exactly what transpired and how we can prevent anything like this from happening again.”
