11 Injured Leaving Beyoncé’s Atlanta Concert After Little Girl Starts A Stampede Because She Was Scared Of A Bug

It’s a wild headline, but it’s true.

Earlier this week, Beyoncé played a show at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia during a stop on her Cowboy Carter tour, but it ended in a frenzy as hundreds and even thousands of fans headed home.

According to 11Alive, a stampede at a rail station started when a 10-year old girl was startled by a bug, as a cockroach, or what we know in the South as the devils called “palmetto bugs,” ran in around in a Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) station, causing her to scream and sending those around her into a panic.

They clearly didn’t know why she was yelling, and people started running because they thought something was seriously wrong, and the escalator was apparently already over crowded due to the fact that so many people were leaving the concert at once.

At the Vine City station, 11 people were injured, and one person even broke their ankle, according to Stephany Fisher, Sr. Director of Communications for MARTA via PEOPLE:

“Just after midnight on Tuesday, July 15, 11 people leaving the Beyoncé concert at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in downtown Atlanta were injured on an escalator at Vine City Station. One person suffered a broken ankle, seven people were transported to the hospital with cuts and scrapes, and one person declined transport. Two people requested medical assistance after reaching their destinations.”

CEO Rhonda Allen told the MARTA board Thursday:

“There was someone who started to scream outside of the station. She was startled by a bug outside, outside the large crowd. Imagine a group of people saying, ‘I want to get down I want to get down,’ began to usher themselves down the escalator.”

Allen also said that the escalator had passed an inspection days earlier, but the weight and sudden movement of so many people trying to get away caused it to speed up, then stop, throwing some to the floor and causing injury.

She added:

“We’re going to have a more aggressive approach to how we’re staffing these event.”

Beyoncé fan Amber Anderson said she got pinned under a man as the mob of at least 20 people fell on top of each other, according to Atlanta News First:

“I see that people are starting to run at the entrance, which of course when you see somebody running, you probably want to run too.”

Just a nightmare, but you can’t blame them for thinking something might have actually been wrong because if that little girls screams as loud as I do when I see a palmetto bug, I can see how this spiraled very quickly. I have had some of the worst experiences of my life coming fact to face with one of those things, and while I do sympathize with the people who suffered injuries, I can’t lie and say I would have had the same reaction as that little girl.

MARTA says they will try to have tighter crowd control and more staff going forward, and that PEOPLE article has some photos of some of the injuries, and the one of the ankle injury is pretty gnarly.

Here’s some footage of the chaos:

The post 11 Injured Leaving Beyoncé’s Atlanta Concert After Little Girl Starts A Stampede Because She Was Scared Of A Bug first appeared on Whiskey Riff.