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U.S. Reopens Borders to International Travel; Democrats Celebrate Infrastructure Bill Passage; Tragedy in Houston. Aired 2- 2:30p ET

Aired November 08, 2021 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:00:00]

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: The continues next with Alisyn and Victor.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Hello, everyone. I'm Alisyn Camerota. Thanks for joining us.

VICTOR BLACKWELL, CNN HOST: I'm Victor Blackwell.

The legal fallout is growing after that deadly Astroworld concert in Houston. A criminal investigation has begun and lawsuits have been filed. Eight people were killed, including a person we just learned the name of, 21-year-old Axel Acosta, a junior at Western Washington University. More than 300 people were treated for medical issues at the venue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA SCHLOMOVITS, WITNESS: Everyone around us was just trying to take each individual breath. And there was just no air left for anyone to breathe. We were too closely compact. Everyone was too pushed up against each other. There was just nowhere to go and no air to breathe.

JOYA MELVIN, CONCERTGOER: He finished a concert and I went to the memorial and I found out that the person that I saw that they were saying dead body, move, was in fact somebody who died that night.

You couldn't control where you were going. I was pushed into a mosh pit by accident, where you just literally are being thrown into a ball of violence

NICK JOHNSON, WITNESS: It was going on for over two hours. And it just got worse and worse. Everyone's like -- you just can't breathe. You just feel like -- feel like there's a weight implanted on you.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CAMEROTA: Houston police say the crowd surge towards the stage as rap star Travis Scott was performing, leaving scores of people, as you heard, crushed and gasping for air and begging for help.

Authorities and concertgoers want to know why the performance kept going during the chaos. Witnesses say Travis Scott did stop several times, but then continued on. There's this clip on social media that were two concert goers are screaming at the staff to stop the show.

"The New York Times" reports that, hours before the concert, Houston's police chief talked to Travis Scott about his serious concerns about the energy of this crowd.

BLACKWELL: CNN's Rosa Flores is in Houston with the latest developments.

So, we know that Travis Scott just sent out a new message about this tragedy. Tell us about that and the latest on the investigation here.

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Travis Scott saying that he is going to pay for the funeral costs for the eight individuals who died and that he is getting in contact with the family members to do that.

He's also saying that he is going to be partnering with multiple organizations to provide mental health for free, that this mental health will be provided online. Now I have talked to a lot of concertgoers who say that they're traumatized after this event.

They talk about having difficulty breathing, their survival instincts kicking in because the situation was so chaotic and so dire, some of them saying that they had no control of their bodies. And now -- now that they're heading back home to parts all over this country, some of them telling me that they're going to have difficulty being inside a party because of this traumatic event.

So that news from Travis Scott definitely something that's going to resonate with a lot of these concertgoers. Now, about the lawsuits that have been filed, there have been multiple lawsuits filed. In general, some of the allegations are gross negligence, in essence, the plaintiffs claiming that these organizers did not organize a safe event.

Manuel Souza is one of the concertgoers who filed one of the lawsuits. And here's an excerpt from that lawsuit.

It says -- quote -- "The plaintiff suffered serious bodily injuries when the uncontrolled crowd at the concert knocked him to the ground and trampled him. The plaintiff's injuries were the inevitable and predictable results of defendants' conscious disregard of the extreme risks of harm to concertgoers that had been escalating since hours earlier."

Now, CNN has reached out to the defendants in this case. It includes Travis Scott, and also Live Nation, and also the promoter, ScoreMore. We have not heard back.

As for the latest on the investigation, at last check, HPD said that they were hoping to get videos, surveillance videos of this event, so that they could look closely to see what triggered this crowd compression towards the stage. And they're also looking for criminal activity, now that not only is the homicide division involved, but also the narcotics division is involved in this investigation after a security officer reported that someone pricked his neck, he went on unconscious, and he was revived with Narcan. [14:05:02]

So, Alisyn and Victor, there are a lot of layers to this investigation because it all started with, yes, a crowd compression, but it escalated into a criminal investigation -- Alisyn, Victor.

CAMEROTA: So, Rosa, tell us more about what we know about the people who were killed.

FLORES: Now we're learning the names of all of the eight individuals. The medical examiner here in Harris County releasing those names just within the hour or so.

Here are their names 23-year-old Rodolfo Pena from Laredo; 21-year-old Franco Patino, he attended Dayton, the University of Dayton, and he's from Illinois; 20-year-old Jacob Jurinke from Illinois as well; 16- year-old Brianna Rodriguez, she attended Houston Heights High School here in Houston; John Hilgert, 14 years of age, he was a ninth grader at Memorial High School; 27-year-old Mirza Baig, 23-year-old Madison Dubiski, and 21-year-old Axel Acosta Avila.

And, Alisyn and Victor, of course, getting answers for all of these families that are now mourning their loved ones, and also for the ones who remain in the hospital. At last check, at least six individuals still remain in the hospital, five of them in the ICU -- Victor, Alisyn.

BLACKWELL: All right, Rosa Flores, thank you for those updates and those names, the youngest victim there 14 years old in the ninth grade.

CAMEROTA: Fourteen.

BLACKWELL: Thank you for that.

We have got new developments coming in. CNN is just learning that there was this detailed operations plan for the Astroworld music festival in Houston, but it did not include a specific contingency for a surging crowd incident, although three people were trampled and hospitalized at the same festival in 2019.

Let's bring in now attorney Steve Adelman. He is vice president of Event Safety Alliance and is the principal author on what is considered the industry rule book for crowd management and safety.

Steve, good to have you.

Let's start with this new reporting, this 56-page document that CNN has. It has scenarios to address active shooter, severe weather, possible riots, civil unrest, but nothing for a potential surge in crowd. The significance of that omission from that plan?

STEVEN ADELMAN, VICE PRESIDENT, EVENT SAFETY ALLIANCE: I haven't seen the plan, so I will comment in general terms. That doesn't surprise me. And the reason for that is, any serious life safety plan, which is

what we're talking about right now -- it's called a life safety plan -- would have measures which deal with, among other things, crowd surges. So those measures are security deployments, barricade configurations, the risk assessment about various levels of crowd activity, dealing with signage, so that people know where the exits are.

There are a whole host of crowd management issues which would bear on a crowd surge situation. So it doesn't surprise me that that particular set of words doesn't appear. It's because it would be part of a much larger issue, which is very comprehensively discussed in a life safety plan.

CAMEROTA: But, Steve, just help us understand. Once there are 50,000 rowdy concertgoers, and they're pushing towards the stage and people are being compressed, what can security do at that point? What's the protocol?

How do you start extricating people before they die?

ADELMAN: Well, first of all, not everybody pushes towards the stage. There are a lot of people who don't want to be in a densely packed crowd. And so they're going to be further back.

Having said that, we know that, in this instance, some people did push towards the stage. And that's not uncommon, just like none of the issues we're talking about here are completely unfamiliar or unforeseen.

Rather, the contingencies are pretty standard, which is, for people who are right up against the barricade and are in obvious distress, the security guards who are standing on the other side of the barricade will literally lift them up out of the crowd over the barricade into an area where there is no crowd at all, so they can catch their breath, get some water, just chill out for a minute, before they are sent through a passage way to either reenter the event towards the back, where the crowd is much less dense, or go to medical if they just want to take some time, or leave the event entirely.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

But, Steve, sorry to interrupt. I mean, they were doing that. You do see security guards trying to get bodies over the gate. But what happened was, it was so densely packed that in the middle of the crowd people -- the security guards couldn't get to them. People were basically becoming unconscious standing up and/or falling to the ground, and they couldn't be lifted and sort of crowd-surfed over to them.

[14:10:12]

And what do you do at that point?

ADELMAN: Well, I think the issue at this point, two days after this tragedy, is to first ask, why did that happen? Either was it something that happened within the crowd? Was it

something that happened outside of the crowd, either during the planning process or the implementation of Friday night's show? I think that's the better question right now, because once the crowd is so densely packed that people are literally fainting on their feet, there isn't much that can be done.

So the whole point of crowd management is to keep that situation from happening.

BLACKWELL: Steve, let's stay right here with the questions you have and the questions investigators are trying to get answers to this criminal investigation to determine what went wrong here.

What are they assessing? And do you see a single major failure that led to what we saw on Friday night?

ADELMAN: I don't see a single major failure. And, frankly, I would be surprised if there were one failure that was the key to everything.

Very rarely in any kind of event-related disaster over the long span of time in this country has it been the result of just one failure, to the exclusion of everything else. Almost always, it is a series of really innocuous things that went in one direction, rather than another, that seemed to add up, until finally the straw that broke the camel's back, and then you get catastrophe, because the one thing that we know for sure is, we're not having this conversation every day or every week.

To the contrary, we know that this event was highly unusual. That's why we're talking. So the key right now is to figure out what happened at this event Friday night that was different than all other similar events.

CAMEROTA: OK, Steve Adelman, thank you very much. We appreciate your time.

Let's bring in now Elie Honig. He's a former federal and state prosecutor and CNN senior legal analyst.

Elie, whose fault was this? Was this the concert organizers? Was this security? Who gets the blame for this?

ELIE HONIG, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: So, Alisyn, I think the first thing you have to look for is, who owed that audience what we call a duty of care under the law? Who was responsible for these people? And I think that certainly would include the concert organizer, arguably the promoter, arguably the artist and the people around him.

And I think, to then take it to the next step, the question is, who failed to perform under that duty of care? As the prior guest said, this is going to be a sort of multifact question. There's probably not going to be one and only one thing you can point to.

But I'll tell you some of the questions I would have. First of all, was this event oversold? Was the crowd too large for the venue? What was the training like of the security staff? Were they properly trained? Or were they just sort of people plucked out of college campuses, as happens sometimes? Were their proper barricades here?

And a big, big question here to me is, why did it take as long as it took for the show to stop after it became originally apparent, apparently to a lot of people, that there was danger happening in the crowd?

BLACKWELL: Yes.

So, what do -- and we know that the first lawsuits have been filed, the first singular lawsuit. What do the plaintiffs here have to prove? And how likely is this to go to trial?

HONIG: Yes, so let's remember, what we have seen so far are civil lawsuits, not criminal. We can get to that in a moment.

BLACKWELL: Yes.

HONIG: But civil lawsuits seek money damages. And it's important to remember, we're going to see these not only likely from the families of the poor people who died, but also from a lot of other concertgoers, people who were injured, people who were traumatized, that kind of thing.

What they have to show is simply negligence, and they have to show that by a preponderance of the evidence, meaning 50.1 percent. And if you look back at history, sadly, we have had incidents like this over history, and in all of those cases, from the Rolling Stones in 1969 at Altamont, the infamous example, to the Great White concert in Rhode Island in 2003, you always see a spate of civil lawsuits.

And they all tend to settle because there's a lot of money at stake here and because liability usually in these cases is clearly established, . So I don't expect to see a trial. I'd expect to see settlements here.

CAMEROTA: Elie, how about the performer, Travis Scott? So there are moments where you see in, I think, cell phone video, he stops, he points at something. He seems confused or concerned about something that's going on, people.

Have said that that was the moment that ambulances were pulling up. What's his liability?

HONIG: So that piece of video is going to be important because it seems to show that Travis Scott knew something was going on in the audience, something severe enough that he would stop and point out into the crowd. That's a fairly unusual step for a performer to take.

That said, the ultimate responsibility here really sits with the management company, the promoters. But I think you want to know, you need to know everything that Travis Scott knew.

I'd also be asking about what did that Houston police chief tell him. How specific were those warnings that we're now hearing the police chief gave Travis Scott beforehand? So I think Travis Scott, he's already been named as a defendant in the civil suits. I think criminal liability, look, that's a whole different step of liability that you would have to show. You would have to show gross negligence, criminal negligence in that case.

[14:15:24]

But I think these are some of the unanswered questions that relate to him and others.

BLACKWELL: Elie Honig, thank you.

HONIG: Thank you.

BLACKWELL: So, after almost 20 months, the U.S. is now reopening its borders to many international travelers. Ahead, we will tell you the requirements and restrictions for vaccinated tourists.

CAMEROTA: And with that bipartisan infrastructure bill on its way to the president's desk, Democrats now shifting their focus to the spending bill, the social safety net bill that still is in limbo.

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[14:20:19]

BLACKWELL: Today, for the first time in 20 months, the United States borders are open to international travelers.

Fully vaccinated travelers from 33 countries, including the U.K. and much of Europe, can now enter the U.S. by air, land and sea without quarantining. Now, air travelers will, however, need a negative COVID test to fly.

CNN business editor at large Richard Quest joins us from one of the U.S.' most popular tourist attractions, the top of the Empire State Building.

Richard, it looks nice up there today.

So does this mean that the U.S. is back to business as usual?

RICHARD QUEST, CNN BUSINESS EDITOR AT LARGE: Absolutely, as far as possible.

And that's what the commerce secretary, she said to me today. She said it was a shot in the arm. And it proves, if not maybe back to normal, at least the U.S. is open for business, because, Alisyn and Victor, besides -- you have to not only think of all the people who live in those countries, the E.U., et cetera, that's now open, but all those travelers who would transit through Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, or London their way to the U.S.

And that's why, today, at Kennedy and at dozens of airports across the United States, there were extraordinarily happy scenes, people who have not been able to come for 20 months seeing relatives, seeing family, and here to do business for the first time. Zoom is good, as they say, but getting on a plane and saying how are you and shaking a hand, they believe, is much better.

BLACKWELL: And, of course, this is great news for those tourist locations like where you are. They're used to seeing so many international tourists.

QUEST: Oh, they're talking about a massive Christmas here in New York. I was round and about in the city over the weekend. And it was packed.

Now, if you add in all the tours, because, remember, the airlines are putting on extra capacity -- United Airlines, for example, is going to five flights a day from London alone. Now, add on more flights from all the other European destinations. New York and company is expecting it will be maybe not a bumper year, but it's going to be packed. Prices will be higher for hotels. We're already seeing some very high rates at five-star hotels in the city.

And I think the big question is going to be, can you get a reservation? Can you get a Broadway show? So, maybe January, February for those who are looking for a bit of a bargain.

CAMEROTA: Oh, good, New York City more packed than usual. Great news.

BLACKWELL: Can't wait.

CAMEROTA: Richard Quest, thank you very much. Great to see you.

BLACKWELL: Thank you, Richard.

QUEST: Thank you.

CAMEROTA: After months of gridlock, the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill is headed to President Biden's desk.

This marks a major legislative win for the president. But the even larger social safety net package is still in limbo.

CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins and CNN congressional correspondent Jessica Dean are with us now.

Jessica, first, it's now to this bill. What will this money be spent on? What's in the bill?

JESSICA DEAN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Right. So now we turn to the money actually going to go to what they had set it aside for.

And this is stuff -- think about it. These are items that you would consider traditional infrastructure. So we're talking roads, bridges, broadband, Internet, which was a big one for bipartisan support. They're talking about the railways, airports, water systems, so billions of dollars headed all across the country to various projects that will shore up America's infrastructure and also expand it into the 21st century. That's the idea, to kind of modernize some of these items that haven't

been modernized in years and years. And what was interesting on Friday night here was just that last-minute scramble, Victor and Alisyn, to really get this over the finish line.

And it took House Speaker Nancy Pelosi really threading the needle between the various factions of her party, getting them as much moving together in the same direction as possible, with each side making promises to one another and then, interestingly, getting some help from 13 House Republicans that supported this bill.

That was more than, frankly, we were really expecting. It got 19 Senate Republicans to support it, but 13 House Republicans supporting it over on the House side, that got it over the threshold. And now it heads to President Biden to become law, but, again, a major, truly bipartisan bill from both chambers now heading to the president's desk, Victor and Alisyn.

CAMEROTA: OK, so, Kaitlan, what's the status now of the Build Back Better package? Where are we?

KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Well, of course, that remains to be seen because what we're essentially waiting on is for those moderate Democrats who signed onto this agreement Friday night to get a -- waiting for that final score.

[14:25:00]

The financial impact is what it is of what that bill is going to look like. They say they want to see those numbers before they actually vote for that bill, though they did sign essentially this agreement on Friday night saying that, if it does pan out to what the administration, what they believe the numbers are going to look like, then they're on board with it.

So, of course, the question here is about the timeline, really, because while Speaker Pelosi has set this deadline of November 15 for that bill in the House. It's then going to go to the Senate, where the White House is already acknowledging it is likely going to change once it's in the hands of the Senate.

So, that remains to be seen what that's going to look like. And so, in the meanwhile, while that is happening here at the White House, President Biden has not yet actually signed this infrastructure bill. The White House says he is waiting until the members of Congress who helped him pass it are back in town from their recess to have a ceremony here at the White House.

But their other focus turns to implementing this bill and selling it. And when it comes to the implementation, the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg -- excuse me -- was just in the Briefing Room with us telling us that the Transportation Department is going to have to staff up when it comes to this, because it is hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal aid that is going to go to these projects that Jessica was just talking about there. And, of course, that is going to require a lot of coordinating within

those departments, not just at Transportation Department, but at several others as well. And then, of course, the other big aspect of this is actually selling this bill and making sure the public knows what Jessica just said there, what is in this and how it's going to change their lives and benefit them.

And here's what Secretary Buttigieg said about that in the Briefing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PETE BUTTIGIEG, U.S. TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY: That will be led by the president traveling to show where the need is and where the action is.

But I'm certainly eager to be part of that effort. I mean, look, a lot of this sells itself, because communities never needed to be persuaded that their bridge needed to be fixed or that their airport needed an upgrade or that their ports needed investment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLLINS: Now, the president has said he believes you could start to see the effects of this bill within two to three months. It's not specifically being laid up at the White House what that is, but he will start by selling this himself on Wednesday in Baltimore, when he visits the Port of Baltimore to talk about how this infrastructure bill that was just passed will help with that.

BLACKWELL: All right, Kaitlan Collins at the White House, Jessica Dean on Capitol Hill, thank you.

In Georgia, new testimony in the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial takes us inside the final moments of his life. We're live from the courthouse next.

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