Live Nation has been sued by three attendees of last year’s Lovers & Friends festival in Las Vegas over injuries and distress that they incurred as a result of a crowd surge that was caused when a loud noise panicked other members of the audience into thinking a gun had been fired.

The recently filed lawsuit explains how two of the plaintiffs, Carla Thomas and Aaliyah Aguilar, sat down on the floor in between performances at the festival in order to rest their legs, as did a number of other attendees.

Then “a loud noise within the premises led to a belief that a shooting had occurred and/or that gun was drawn. A sea of people in the premises then surged toward plaintiffs’ location, pushing plaintiffs against the other attendees in the festival”.

“Plaintiffs were pushed, smashed, dragged, kicked, stepped on, trampled and crushed to the ground by the surging crowd”, it adds. “Plaintiffs felt frightened, shocked, anxious and light-headed during the entire ordeal”.

The lawsuit seeks to hold Live Nation, as promoter of the festival, liable for the injuries and distress suffered by the plaintiffs on the basis that it failed to put in place sufficient crowd management and security personnel to deal with an incident of this kind.

“Plaintiffs screamed for help from the event organisers and security, but none came”, the legal filing says. “Plaintiffs screamed for emergency medical care for their injuries, but none came”.

Although the plaintiffs were able to “extricate themselves away from the rushing crowd and out of the premises to safety”, they “suffered serious injuries that required medical care and treatment. Plaintiffs also suffered general damages arising from the incident, as they experienced, among other things, fear for their safety, fear of death, anxiety, and depression”.

The festival’s organisers should have foreseen the potential of an incident like the crowd surge that occurred, the lawsuit argues, but despite that fact “defendants failed to employ adequate, properly trained, monitored, and supervised reasonable security, safety and medical provision measures to prevent those persons from being knocked down, stepped on, trampled, dragged on, and crushed without adequate medical service provision”.

Live Nation is yet to comment on the lawsuit. Meanwhile, the next edition of Lovers & Friends is set to take place on 6 May.

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