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Class action launches demanding Route 91 Harvest refunds from Live Nation

By | Published on Friday 2 March 2018

Route 91 Harvest

Lawyers have filed a class action lawsuit against Live Nation, demanding that the company refund ticket monies to everyone who attended the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last year. The closing night of the event saw the deadliest mass shooting in US history occur, when a gunman killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others when he opened fire from a nearby hotel.

The case was filed in Orange County, California earlier this week. The legal team involved argues that some people who privately requested a refund received them, but there have been no moves to automatically pay back all those who bought tickets.

The lawyer who filed the class action, Mark Robinson, who was already representing a couple who were seeking a refund, told Fox News: “We didn’t think it was fair that some who privately asked for refunds got them, when really everybody who bought a ticket deserves a full refund”.

Another lawyer working on the case, Craig Eiland, elaborated further: “As we were interviewing several hundred of our clients, we realised some had received refunds and some had not. It didn’t matter if they were family members of deceased, gunshot victims or traumatised because of the shooting and their escape. The only factor was that those that heard about a refund through Facebook or friends and demanded a refund, got it. So we decided to make one demand on behalf of everyone”.

If refunds across the board were achieved, that would create an interesting challenge for anyone who bought a ticket on the secondary market, in that the refund would presumably go to the reseller not the person who actually attended the show.

Even if that issue could be addressed somehow, not everyone who attended the event has welcomed the news of the new litigation. Some have said that getting a refund is perhaps not the thing that people should be focussing on in the continuing aftermath of the shooting.

While all this is going on, new financial support has become available to victims of the attack, and those affected by it. A number of funds have already been set up, but this week a new organisation, Route 91 Strong, made its first payments.

Co-founded by one of the survivors of the attack, Brian Claypool, he tells the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the aim of the group is to help those who do not meet the criteria of the other funds currently in operation. “We’re trying to help people who have fallen through the cracks”, he says.

Meanwhile, Tennessee’s state government said this week that it believes residents of the state who attended the festival may be eligible to apply for support from the Nevada Crime Victim Compensation scheme. It said that it was aware of 40 people who had bought Route 91 Harvest tickets within Tennessee, as well as more who attended as musicians or in other roles at the event.

The LA Times also reports that lawyers are still trying to ascertain the value of the gunman’s estate. A number of those affected by the attack have already made legal moves to claim a portion of this money. Some estimates have been as high as $5 million, although the court overseeing the estate heard this week that it may actually be less than $1 million. A final figure is scheduled to be reported back to the court on 31 May.



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