Bloody shirts and stomped-on phones: Attorney describes 'nightmarish' scene at Astroworld

• An attorney who on Tuesday visited the aftermath of the Astroworld concert said it was nightmarish.
• Alex Hilliard told Insider he saw shoes, bloody shirts, and broken cellphones everywhere.

The first thing that the attorney Alex Hilliard noticed as he arrived at the aftermath of the Astroworld Festival was the shoes - hundreds of shoes scattered everywhere.

He then noticed torn shirts with blood on them and cellphones that had been crushed and trampled, he said.

Hilliard, a lawyer at Hilliard Martinez Gonzales LLP in Houston representing attendees of the rapper Travis Scott's concert, visited the site at NRG Park on Tuesday.

He said what he found was "nightmarish" and "traumatic."

"I had never seen anything like it," Hilliard told Insider. "It was clear that so much had gone wrong and so many people had been hurt."

A crowd surge during Scott's performance on Friday crushed fans in the packed audience. The chaos has left nine people dead and hundreds injured.

From Tuesday to Thursday, Hilliard said he and other lawyers and experts were given access to the site, which hadn't been cleaned as authorities pieced together what happened.

No charges have been filed in the incident.

Apart from the bloodied clothes, Hilliard said he was stunned by the number of phones left at the venue.

"Imagine how many of those phones were being called by loved ones" on the night of the concert, he said.

Hilliard said his firm was representing over 100 people in connection with the concert. Over 40 lawsuits had been filed in response to the Astroworld concert as of Thursday. Hilliard said he expected more plaintiffs to join them in the coming days.

Representatives for Astroworld, the concert promoter Live Nation, and the organizer Scoremore did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment on Thursday.

In a statement on Monday, Scoremore and Live Nation said the companies were working with authorities and their teams were mourning those who were killed.

Hilliard said his clients had struggled to find the words to describe how bad the tragedy was.

"It was surreal and it was eye-opening," he said.

Hilliard said after his team left the site on Tuesday, no one spoke for about five minutes.

"It was, in my opinion, one of the most traumatic, chaotic post-incident scenes I have ever witnessed in my life," he said. "It was a crime scene."