A 15-year-old girl died of an acute asthma attack at the Louder Than Life Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, on the night of Sept. 28.
The teen, Trinity Jackson, who is asthmatic, was working a four-hour shift at the rock festival as a food vendor when she started having trouble breathing and feeling unwell.
Her inhaler did not offer much help, nor did the breathing machine her mother, Brandi Moorman, had rushed to her.
“It acts up a little bit every allergy season,” Moorman told WDRB. “She had her inhaler with her on-site, (and) we had her rescue machine.”
“The inhaler wasn’t working, she didn’t feel,” Moorman said. “She felt like her chest was heavy, and we needed help.”
Moorman brought her daughter to the medical tent by golfcart, because Trinity was not able to walk by that time.
At the tent, Trinity received medical treatment by the festival medics, who told the mother Trinity needed to get to a hospital. But they did not order an ambulance nor offer any form of transportation. After providing treatment, the medical staff left Trinity despite her still having trouble breathing.
“They OK’d it for us to leave the tent. She didn’t walk into the tent, she got there on a golf cart to the tent, but we were to walk out of the tent and into the crowd,” Moorman said, the outlet reported.
Moorman realized that her daughter needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible, but could not reach a medical tent amidst the 120,000 people in attendance, so she had to take her little girl on her back and proceed to the exit alone.
“I carried her through a crowd of a 120,000 people … while Gun N’ Roses were playing, asking everyone to help me,” she said.
At the parking lot, Trinity collapsed. “By this time, she had already collapsed in my arms, I was holding her on the pavement, she wasn’t breathing,” Moorman said.
“I saw her take her last gasp of air. In my arms, on the ground, at the Fair and Expo Center,” she added, WLKY reported.
Trinity was eventually rushed to the hospital by ambulance, where later she was pronounced dead. Her heart had stopped 36 minutes before that, doctors said.
The festival organization had issued a statement to WDRB, offering their condolences to the family: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family, whose privacy we wish to respect. We are cooperating with local agencies as they conduct an investigation related to a medical transport from the festival on Saturday night,” the statement read.
A GoFundMe page has started for the family to cover the funeral expenses.
