Number 7 Faster Horses Incident
In July of 2021, three young men were found dead in a camping trailer while attending the Faster
Horses music festival, in Michigan. The event, which takes place at the Michigan International
Speedway, is also known as the "three-day hillbilly sleepover" as most festival goers
will typically camp in and around the racetrack. After a concerned friend of the group had called
the emergency services, first responders arrived at the scene and opened the camping trailer to
find five men, all of whom were unconscious. Dawson Brown and Richie Mays II, both aged 20,
were pronounced dead at the scene, as was 19-year-old Kole Sova. All three were Michigan
Center High School graduates who’d played on the same football team. 20-year-olds Rayfield Johnson
and Kurtis Stitt were taken to the hospital in critical condition but ultimately survived.
In what Lenawee County Sheriff Troy Bevier deemed to have been an “absolutely tragic” event it was
determined that the men had suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. They hadn’t properly stored
a generator they’d been using which resulted in them inhaling the deadly fumes. In the aftermath,
Sheriff Brevier issued a warning to people using generators, urging them to make sure such devices
were kept in a well-ventilated area. Number 6 Makayla Hostetler
After she’d attended the 2018 edition of the Faster Horses festival, in Michigan,
a young woman was fatally struck by an SUV. On July the 23rd, Makayla Hostetler, aged 19,
was walking on the shoulder of the road, near the Michigan International Speedway, alongside her
boyfriend, 21-year-old Colin Campbell. Even though the festival had just ended, a number of attendees
were reportedly heading to after parties. Shortly after 4 am, 17-year-old Jose Mora was driving
his 2005 Chevrolet TrailBlazer north on Brooklyn Highway. By his account, Mora glanced at his gear
shift and only peripherally spotted the couple before plowing into them. He denied that he’d
been looking at his phone prior to the collision, although a test revealed it had been used 7 times
between 4:10 and 4:20 am, a timeline corresponding to that in which the accident was suspected to
have occurred. Hostetler sustained mortal injuries while Campbell was left in critical condition. He
had no recollection of the crash after sustaining traumatic brain injuries for which he spent
considerable time at an in-patient rehabilitation center. There were no charges filed against Mora,
as prosecutors deemed there wasn’t enough evidence to pursue a criminal case.
At the time of the accident, he was under the limit for alcohol consumption
and there was no irrefutable indication of moving violations or distracted driving.
Number 5 Louella Fletcher-Michie An hour before her 25th birthday,
on September the 10th of 2017, a woman died in the woods at the edge of the Bestival music festival,
in Dorset, England. Louella Fletcher-Michie, daughter of Scottish film and television actor
John Michie, was attending the festival with her boyfriend, Ceon Broughton, aged 28. The aspiring
rapper had reportedly procured the recreational drug 2-CP, classified as a Class-A substance,
and given it to Fletcher-Michie. He then filmed her over a period of six hours as she began
to hallucinate on the drug and beg for help, leading up to her death. At various moments in
the harrowing footage, Fletcher-Michie tried eating thorns and had begun to slap herself,
in an evident state of confusion, with Broughton at one point calling her a “drama queen”.
In spite of her being in distress, Broughton didn’t take her to the festival’s hospital tent,
even though they were only several hundred yards from it. Prosecutors would later argue that it was
because he feared repercussions stemming from a suspended prison sentence, he’d been given about
a month prior. Fletcher-Michie began shouting for her parents and eventually talked to them on the
phone. They immediately began the 120-mile drive from London to Dorset but, unfortunately, arrived
too late to find her alive. It was subsequently argued that she was already dead at Broughton’s
feet in the last video he’d taken of her. He was arrested but defended his actions by claiming that
he didn’t want to leave Fletcher-Michie alone in the woods to get help and that he only thought she
was having a “bad trip”. He was found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence in February of
2019. His 8.5-year prison sentence was overturned on appeal and only a drug charge remained,
as a judge determined prosecutors had failed to prove that Fletcher-Michie would’ve survived
had she received help. Number 4 Isabella Cimetta
Texas teenager Isabella Cimetta suffered a fatal gunshot wound to her abdomen
while at a renaissance fair, on October the 25th of 2020. The authorities responded to reports of
a disturbance at the Texas Renaissance Festival campgrounds, in Todd Mission, at around 2:40 am.
19-year-old Cimetta and Sean Campbell, aged 22, were acquaintances who’d travelled to the festival
along with other friends. Another attendee, Mitchell Heasley, told investigators that he
and Cimetta had gotten into an argument. Campbell then intervened and put a gun to Heasley’s head.
According to a probable cause affidavit, an altercation ensued with the former attempting
to disarm Campbell. During the struggle, the weapon discharged and a round struck Cimetta,
who later passed away. Campbell fled the scene but was later found in a car with a Sig Sauer
9mm handgun in the glove compartment. He admitted to firing the shot that killed
Cimetta and was held at Grimes County Jail on two counts of aggravated assault
with a deadly weapon. Number 3 Astroworld Crush
On November the 5th of 2021, a massive human crush occurred at the NRG Park, in Houston, Texas,
during a performance by rapper Travis Scott, on the first day of the Astroworld festival.
Eight people died on the night of the concert and two more passed away from
their injuries over the following days, while at least 25 were hospitalized. Live Nation,
along with its affiliates, operated and managed the disastrous event,
which was also streamed live by Apple Music. Since the morning, hours before the scheduled opening,
groups had begun breaching checkpoints and flooding the venue. As noted by the Houston
Police Department, volatile crowd behavior continued into the evening, with hundreds
being treated at the festival’s aid stations. There was no act on the festival’s second stage,
therefore the estimated 50,000 in attendance all assembled outside the main stage to watch Scott,
who was also the festival’s founder, as he began his performance at 9:02 pm. Houston Fire Chief
Sam Peña would later tell the media that the crowd “began to compress towards the front of the stage”
while also surging from the sides and the concert rapidly devolved into chaos. Concertgoers began
falling and trampling over each other. Multiple sources, including forensic analysis and video
evidence, indicated that at least one attendee was fatally crushed under a mass of people
right at the concert’s onset, with no evidence he ever got up again. 10 minutes into Scott’s
performance, a tightly packed group of fans in the crowd’s southern quadrant began
screaming for help. Those who died or suffered critical injuries are believed to have suffered
compressive asphyxiation after being forced into as little as 1.85 square feet of space
per person. Medical personnel couldn’t reach those in need as piles of fans were nearly two-person
deep in some areas. In the pandemonium, there were instances of unconscious fans being crowd-surfed
to safety. Many had started chanting for the show to be stopped while one woman was filmed climbing
a ladder to the media tower and pleading for help from camera operators. A man joined her shouting
“people are dying” while elsewhere in the crowd fans had started dancing on top of ambulances
fruitlessly trying to get through. Scott had paused his performance a total of three
times throughout, once to report that someone had passed out, but continued singing after each one,
encouraging more fervent reactions from his fans. The concert ended at 10:12 and gained
widespread notoriety in the aftermath. The investigation is ongoing but a number
of lawsuits have already been launched against Scott and the festival’s operators. While there’d
been considerable problems with the festival’s overall organization, the rapper himself was also
heavily criticized for not stopping the concert or attempting to better control the crowd.
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Number 2 Alexandra Ross King In January of 2019, a young Australian woman died
of an MDMA overdose at the FOMO Music Festival in Parramatta Park. While heading to the event,
19-year-old Alexandra Ross-King and her friends had had stopped in Gosford, where they bought
drugs from a local dealer. They then took a bus to the festival, held in the western part of Sydney.
Because drinks at the event were so expensive, the group decided to arrive already drunk and
consumed juice mixed with vodka on the way. In about half an hour, Ross-King took roughly three
quarters of an MDMA capsule which she washed down with alcohol. Before entering the FOMO festival,
she ingested two more capsules at once, nervous that the police might find the drugs
on her. She spent the next few hours dancing, as temperatures climbed up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit,
and drinking vodka mixed with Red Bull. She then began to feel unwell and her friends helped her
to a medical tent, where she began to suffer from muscle spasms, high fever and irregular breathing.
The teenager was rushed to Westmead Hospital, where she suffered multiple cardiac arrests and
ultimately passed away. Two unnamed men, aged 20 and 23, were arrested in the aftermath by
Gosford Police for indirectly supplying the drugs that had claimed Ross-King’s life.
Number 1 Mawazine Stampede Shortly after midnight, on May the 24th of 2009,
a deadly stampede occurred at a soccer stadium in Rabat, Morocco, during the Mawazine international
music festival. A free concert by pop star Abdelaziz Stati had begun later than billed
allowing festival attendees, who’d finished concerts at other locations, to make their way
to the Hay Nahda stadium. The stampede occurred towards the end of the performance,
when many of the 70,000 in attendance tried to leave the stadium at the same time. A wire fence
collapsed as the enormous mass of people began overflowing out of the venue. 11 concertgoers
died, with their bodies only discovered after the stampede had ended, and at least as many
were hospitalized. Rescuers subsequently had to pull survivors from the wreckage. The Governor
of Rabat at the time blamed the tragedy on the concertgoers, claiming they’d “decided to go over
the metal barriers to have a quick exit”. However, survivors questioned why the exits had been shut,
even though it was a free concert, and why the police officers at the scene, which numbered
close to 3,000, hadn’t intervened when the incident had become serious. King Mohammed VI
extended his condolences to the victims’ families and offered to pay for funeral and hospital costs.
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