Houston police are walking back a claim that a security guard at Astroworld was injected with drugs after saying he felt a prick in his neck.
Buzzfeed reported that Houston Police Chief Troy Finner told reporters on Wednesday that the security guard had actually been hit in the head, not pricked in the neck, as he had said over the weekend. He also said the security guard had not been injected with drugs. A Houston police spokesperson told Buzzfeed that the original misinformation was due to what officers had been told by medical staff at the festival, but speaking to the actual security guard led to the truth.
“Members of the medical team said that a male security guard had come in and said that somebody had pricked his neck,” Finner told reporters. “We felt that it could have been something ingested. We did locate this security guard. His story is not consistent with that. He says he was struck in his head. He went unconscious. He woke up in the security tent. He says that no one injected drugs in him.”
Finner had originally told reporters on Saturday, after the Astroworld tragedy, that the security guard had been injected with drugs. As the Houston Chronicle reported:
The mass casualty event is now a criminal investigation involving police homicide and narcotics divisions, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said. Some people were trampled, and autopsy reports are being conducted, according to law enforcement officials.
The chief also addressed swirling narratives about nefarious drug activity at the event, but urged caution in rushing to assess those claims. He confirmed, however, that one security officer went unconscious after feeling a prick in his neck during the melee. He was revived after medical authorities administered Narcan, or Naloxone, and they discovered a prick similar to what one would expect from an injection, Finner said.
As Buzzfeed noted, Finner’s original statements about the needle prick “fed into already heightened concerns over ‘needle spiking,’ the act of administering drugs into someone’s body via a needle, rather than slipping drugs into a drink.”
“After the chief made the initial statements about the security guard, rumors spread across social media. TMZ also claimed that ‘someone in the crowd went crazy and began injecting people with some sort of drug’ and suggested that this may have led to deaths. But, in spite of all the video and social media posts from people in the crowd, there’s been no evidence that this happened. None of the 50,000 people who attended the music festival have spoken publicly about any needle spiking,” the outlet added.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, eight people have been confirmed dead after the crowd surged the stage during rapper Travis Scott’s performance at Astroworld. The Associated Press reported that the crowd “suddenly surged toward the stage during a performance by rapper Travis Scott, squeezing fans so tightly together that they could not breathe or move their arms and killing eight people in the chaos” with many others hospitalized.