Astroworld: Victim’s father says ‘we were told our son was not on list of the dead’

The father of a 21-year-old man who died at the Travis Scott concert, has claimed his family was initially told by the authorities their son was not on the list of the dead.

Axel Acosta, of Washington state, had travelled to Houston by himself to attend the concert, finally able to afford a ticket for a flight, and the price of entry.

Yet, the trip turned to tragedy, when a crush among the crowd left eight people dead and hundreds injured.

On Monday, as a number of lawsuits were filed against the rapper and the promoters of the concert at the Astroworld festival, a lawyer for the Acosta family said alleged that the young man had the “life squeezed out of him”.

Meanwhile, his father, Edgar Acosta, said the family had initially been told that their son was not on the list of fatalities from Friday night’s incident at the NRG Park.

Mr Acosta said at a press conference in Houston, that he had struggled to find out information about his son after news of the tragedy broke on Saturday evening. He said he called the hotel his son had book and was told he had not spent the night there.

“That’s when I started calling the sheriff’s office [and the] reunification [hotline number],” he said.

“And they told me, ‘Mr Acosta, you son is not on the list. So you don’t have to worry about anything’. He’s not on the list of the dead people or the injured people’.

He said he had then asked if there were any bodies people who had not been identified, and was again told he did not need to worry, as all the victims had been matched with names.

Yet, the family was not put at ease. They discovered that the young man’s phone was in the lost and found facility at the concert.

Eventually, on Sunday, his brother, Joel, identified his sibling after the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences in Texas, which was seeking the public’s help to identify the man, released a photograph online.

Tony Buzbee, a Houston lawyer hired by the family of Axel, who was studying computer science at Western Washington University in Bellingham, said his clients had been treated “horrifically”.

“It was only until they found the picture going around on the internet that they realised a member of their family had died,” he said.

“It was not simply the fact their son had died, their brother had died, the way they found out was horrific.”

Mr  Buzbee said he would be filing a lawsuit on behalf of the family in the coming days.

He said: “He did not need to die.”