10178279 Travis Scott cancels Vegas festival after being ‘too distraught to play’

Travis Scott will not be performing at the Day N Vegas Festival and will provide full refunds for all attendees.

The news comes just days after eight people died while attending his Astroworld festival at NRG Park in Houston, Texas.

The rapper, 30, is ‘too distraught to play,’ Variety reported.

Travis was scheduled to perform on Sunday, November 13 at the Day N Vegas Festival at Las Vegas Festival Grounds.

The now-cancelled performance was set up like the deadly Astroworld concert with general admission and no assigned seats.

Full refunds will be given to attendees who bought tickets to Astroworld. 

Eight people died Friday at Travis’ show, with the those lost ranging in age from 14 to 27.

The concert had a crowd of 50,000 people with a surge toward the stage happening at 9:38 pm local time in Houston.

The crowd surge took place 32 mins after Travis’ set began. 

 During the surge, eight fans including a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl were crushed to death.

Travis continued to perform up to 30 minutes as people were killed and with the crowd chanting ‘stop the show.’  

Police chief Troy Finner, who knows Scott and felt that he had been trying to do good for his hometown, visited the musician in his trailer before the show on Friday.

He told the megastar that he was concerned about ‘the energy in the crowd,’ a source told The New York Times.

City officials knew that fans of the rapper were raucous after the Astroworld Festival resulted in a stampede that sent three people to the hospital two years earlier.

Houston bolstered the police force with more officers in the months leading up to the concert, while Live Nation, the organizers, hired additional private security.

But that didn’t prevent dozens of fans rushing through security barriers around the venue on Friday night before the festival started.

The show was called off 30 minutes before schedule, but half an hour after a ‘mass casualty event’ had already been declared by the fire department.

Fire Chief Samuel Peña said on Sunday that Scott and the organizers could have stepped in and paused the show.

‘The one person who can really call for and get a tactical pause when something goes wrong is that performer. They have that bully pulpit and they have a responsibility,’ Chief Peña told the NYT. 

‘If somebody would have said, ‘Hey, shut this thing down and turn on the lights until this thing gets corrected’ — and that coming from the person with the mic — I think could have been very helpful.’

Scott and Live Nation have declined to comment on the specifics but say they are co-operating with the police investigation. 

Scott, who said he was ‘devastated’ about the deaths and couldn’t ‘imagine anything like this happening,’ has twice been convicted for encouraging fans to jump security barriers and rush the stage at previous concerts.

Scott and Drake are being sued for ‘inciting the crowd’ by one concert-goer who says he was left ‘severely injured.’