Eight people were killed and several injured in a crowd surge at a music festival in Houston on Friday night, in what the city’s mayor called “a tragedy on many different levels”. Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Sylvester Turner said the dead ranged in age from 14 to 27, the second teenaged victim being 16 years old. Thirteen of 25 people taken to hospital were still in care, he said, five of them under the age of 18. Turner said it was too early to draw conclusions about what went wrong. Judge Lina Hidalgo, Harris county’s top elected official, said: “It may well be that this tragedy is the result of unpredictable events, of circumstances coming together that couldn’t possibly have been avoided. But until we determine that, I will ask the tough questions.” The surge towards the stage at the Astroworld festival occurred just after 9pm, while the rapper Travis Scott was performing. The Houston fire chief, Samuel Peña, said crowd movement caused panic and injuries. Then “people began to fall out, become unconscious, and it created additional panic”. The show was called off and the festival cancelled. In a tweet on Saturday, Scott said he was “absolutely devastated by what took place last night” and pledged to work “together with the Houston community to heal and support the families in need”. Hidalgo told reporters: “When we read these ages – 14, 16, 21, 21, 23, 23, 27 – it just breaks your heart and I know that the images we’ve seen are hard to stomach and I imagine more will surface that are hard to stomach.” Family members for six of the dead had been notified, Turner said, adding that identifying information would not immediately be released. Hidalgo said family for one victim had not been found and one victim had not been identified. Police have opened a criminal investigation. The Houston police chief, Troy Finner, told reporters there were “a lot of narratives out there right now” about alleged criminal behavior among festival-goers. “I think that all of us need to be respectful of the families and make sure that we follow the facts and evidence and that’s what we’re trying to do here in the Houston police department,” he said. But he added: “I will tell you, one of the narratives was that some individual was injecting other people with drugs. “We do have a report of a security officer, according to the medical staff that was out and treated him last night, that he was reaching over to restrain a citizen and he felt a prick in his neck. When he was examined he went unconscious. They administered Narcan, he was revived and the medical staff did notice a prick that was similar to a prick that you would get if somebody is trying to inject.” Scott, 29 and a Houston native, founded the Astroworld festival in 2018 and it has taken place at NRG Park each year since except for 2020. Scott’s performance on Friday was livestreamed by Apple Music. The Houston Chronicle reported that the rapper stopped a number of times during the 75-minute set when he spotted fans in distress, asking security to help them. Emergency vehicles, lights and alarms flashing, cut through the crowd. A senior Houston police officer, Larry Satterwhite, was near the front. He said it seemed the surge “happened all at once”. “Suddenly we had several people down on the ground, experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode,” he said. “And so we immediately started doing CPR, and moving people right then, and that’s when I went and met with the promoters and they agreed to end early in the interest of public safety.” An audience member, Seanna Faith McCarty, described the chaos. “Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, people began to drown – in other people,” she wrote on Instagram. “The rush of people became tighter and tighter. Breathing became something only a few were capable of. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick, hot air.” Suddenly, McCarty said, she realized she and those around her were at risk of being trampled to death. “It was like watching a Jenga tower topple,” she wrote. “Person after person were sucked down. You could not guess from which direction the shove of hundreds of people would come next. You were at the mercy of the wave.” Officials transported 17 people to hospital, including 11 in cardiac arrest, Peña said. Event promoters had arranged for medical units to be on the scene but they were “quickly overwhelmed”. More than 300 were treated in a field hospital. Peña said one person hurt was 10 years old. Approximately 50,000 people attended the event, Peña added. The fire department set up a reunification centre at a hotel, for families who had not heard from loved ones. The Houston office of emergency management created a hotline for people unable to contact festival-goers. On Saturday, Hidalgo told reporters she “spent time at the reunification center talking to families, hearing their anguish, those that didn’t know where their loved ones were”. “Sometimes it’s harder not to know,” she said. It was the most accidental deaths at a US concert since the Station nightclub fire, which killed 100 people in Rhode Island in 2003. In a statement, organizers said: “Our hearts are with the Astroworld festival family tonight – especially those we lost and their loved ones.”