A man hired to work security at the Astroworld Festival in Houston said he was overcome with a powerful sense of foreboding that inspired him to quit the day of the tragic concert.
Darius Williams explained in detail during his live interview with TMZ that he believed the training and the security apparatus at Astroworld, which featured Travis Scott and Drake, were woefully insufficient on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021. To Williams, it was a portent of bad things to come.
His fears, tragically, proved prophetic. More than 50,000 people attended the concert when something incited panic among the herd of concertgoers, sparking a stampede that killed eight people and injured 300 others.
Williams told the entertainment publication that the information on the logistics and training were hazy and delivered in a haphazard way.
“It was pretty vague exactly what the roles would be. The day before Astroworld, I completed the orientation and the training for the process, and when I arrived on Friday morning around 7 a.m., they were still pretty vague. [They] didn’t really tell us what we would be doing,” Williams said.
“The teacher, he was actually giving us the answers as we were going through the books ourselves and trying to hurry up and fill out the answers,” he continued, adding that the event was “definitely understaffed in every sense of the word.”
As the security guards walked the perimeter of NRG Park on the morning of Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, Williams became even more convinced of the potential dangers of working the festival.
“I just decided it would be best to just leave and to just not work the festival altogether because I just had a feeling that I would be in unsafe conditions,” Williams said.
