Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the United Kingdom's University of Suffolk, has testified as an expert witness in court cases involving crowds. He said he usually does not look at eyewitness reports in the early stages of analyzing an incident because emotions can cloud the picture, and witnesses can see only what's immediately around them.īased on fire codes, the venue could have held 200,000 people, but city officials limited the attendance to 50,000, Houston Fire Chief Samuel Pena said. "It was the crowd control at the point of the stage that was the issue, especially as the crowd began to surge toward the stage," Pena said. The deaths called to mind a 1979 concert by the Who where 11 people died as thousands of fans tried to get into Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum. Other past crowd catastrophes include the deaths of 97 people in an overcrowded Hillsborough Stadium in 1989 in Sheffield, England, and numerous disasters connected with the annual hajj in Saudi Arabia. People in the Houston crowd reported lots of pushing and shoving during the performances leading up to Scott's set. Then when Scott took the stage, the crowd seemed to rush to the front, trying to get closer to the stage, said Nick Johnson, a high school senior from the Houston suburb of Friendswood who was at the concert.
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