9-Year-Old Astroworld Victim With Brain Swelling And Damage To All Organs Placed In Medically Induced Coma

As the identities of the Astroworld victims emerged on Monday, the family of 9-year-old Ezra Blount revealed he is in a medically induced coma after being trampled when his father passed out on Friday night.

According to his grandmother, Tericia Blount, Ezra was on his father’s shoulders as the crowd of over 50,000 began to surge around 9:30 p.m. local time on Nov. 5.

“He kept screaming, ‘I can’t breathe.’ But everyone was pushing,” Mrs. Blount tells Rolling Stone. “It was so tight with no exits. His dad couldn’t breathe at all and passed out. We don’t really know what happened to Ezra after that.”

The boy remained separated from his father, Treston Blount, until the family found him at a nearby children’s hospital, listed as John Doe. The family made no mention of the father’s medical condition.

Ezra was one of several people transported from the Astroworld site at NRG Stadium in Houston to area hospitals while receiving CPR for cardiac arrest. He is currently in a medically induced coma as doctors try to manage several serious injuries.

“He has injuries to his kidney, to his lung, to his liver,” his grandmother says. “Basically, every organ has damage. He had cardiac arrest. His heart is weak and has damage as well. And his brain has swelling, and he’s in an induced coma. They’re just trying to keep him comfortable and trying to figure out a plan for him. They tried to take him off the medications that were paralyzing him, to keep him still, and they had to put him back on. We’re just at that place right now, just hoping for the best in spite of all the negative information.”

The Blounts have hired civil rights attorney Ben Crump to represent them as they seek to hold someone accountable for Ezra’s injuries.

“The suffering that this family is going through is immeasurable,” Crump said in a statement. “This little boy had his whole life ahead of him — a life that is currently hanging in the balance because of the reckless mismanagement that ensued at the Astroworld Festival.”

Crump indicated that he also represents others who were injured at the festival, which left eight individuals between the ages of 14 and 27 dead.