Woman mistakenly declared dead in Astroworld even though she wasn’t there
Australian teenager says unknown social media users wrongly identified her
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An Australian teenager has alleged that she was wrongly declared dead after the Astroworld Festival by an anonymous Twitter user after tributes were paid to her.
Amelyun Nguyen, a 17-year-old from Sydney, alleged in a TikTok video last week that she “woke up and the world pronounced me dead” amid reports from Houston, Texas, of the deaths of 10 people who were caught in the crowd crush.
Although Ms Nguyen was not identified by Texas authorities, the teenager shared screenshots of social media users wrongly naming her as “the first to be announced dead” from Astroworld Festival, and which incorrectly spelled her name.
She told BuzzFeed News on Saturday that she was at home in Australia and did not know why an unknown Twitter user had used a picture of her to announce her death as one of the Astroworld victims.
Neither was she a fan of rapper Travis Scott, who has dismissed accusations that he was to blame for the chaos at Astroworld.
As has a private medical provider, ParaDox, and fire and police forces in Houston been forced to answer who was to blame for dozens of injuries and crowd control at the festival on 5 November.
An investigation is ongoing.
Ms Nguyen, whose TikTok video has since been viewed more than eight million times, added in her interview that she was “not a Travis Scott fan, before and after the incident”, that her friends made her “feel so much better” about the accusations of her death.
“I told my close mutuals and we all had a good laugh”, she added, after dozens of messages were sent to the Sydney teenager on Twitter and TikTok after the incorrect announcement was widely shared.
Texas authorities last week announced the deaths of eight victims of the Astroworld crowd crush, with a 22-year-old university student becoming a ninth victim on Wednesday, and a nine-year-old boy becoming the tenth victim on Sunday.
Houston’s fire chief, Samuel Peña, told reporters last week that “The crowd began to compress towards the front of the stage, and that caused some panic, and it started causing some injuries”.
Call logs from 911 have also revealed how hundreds of concert attendees were treated in the hours before the crowd crush, and that the festival had allegedly “no control” over the behaviour of a number of the 55,000 concert goers.