Live Nation Reaches Settlement With Families of Beyond Wonderland Shooting Victims

Live Nation has reached a wrongful death settlement with families of the two women killed by a gunman at the 2023 Beyond Wonderland dance music festival in Washington.

In a Wednesday (May 20) court filing, lawyers representing the estates of Brandy Escamilla and Josilyn Ruiz told a Seattle judge they’ve “resolved and settled all claims asserted” against Live Nation, which operates the Gorge Amphitheatre and promotes Beyond Wonderland through its partial subsidiary Insomniac Events. Escamilla and Ruiz were fatally shot at the festival in June 2023 by a man named James Kelly, who allegedly opened fire after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

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Details of the settlement have not been disclosed. Reps for Live Nation and the victims’ estates did not immediately return requests for comment on Friday (May 22).

The families of Escamilla and Ruiz had been scheduled to begin a trial on June 1 in their 2024 lawsuit alleging Live Nation could have prevented the shooting if it had more carefully screened festival attendees for drugs and weapons or ejected Kelly after he began acting suspiciously. Co-plaintiff Lily Luksich, who was Kelly’s girlfriend at the time of the incident and was shot but survived her injuries, has not settled her claims and still plans to go to trial next month.

Luksich’s attorney, Tomás Gahan , told Billboard on Friday that the trial structure will be “largely unchanged” despite the Escamilla and Ruiz estates exiting the case.

“The jury will still hear about Live Nation’s decisions to ignore its own policies regarding gun searches and its absolute reliance on a skeleton crew of understaffed, undertrained and inexperienced canine security team as the only layer of security trying to keep thousands of paying festival attendees safe,” said Gahan. “Predictably, they were unable to do so, and a mix of drugs and guns led to horrific outcomes.”

Another victim who was injured in the shooting but lived, Andrew Cuadra, also sued Live Nation separately in 2024. Docket entries show that his case has been at least partially settled, though the specifics were not clear as of press time.

Live Nation has argued that the tragic events at Beyond Wonderland were “heinous, random acts of murder.” The company says it could not have foreseen that Kelly, an upstanding Army service member with no known violent history, would go on an “unprovoked homicidal rampage” during a “bad trip.” It also says its security team’s gun-sniffing dogs did in fact search Kelly’s car when he entered the Gorge campground, but found nothing.

Kelly is being prosecuted on criminal murder charges in military court, since he was serving at a Washington army base at the time of the shooting. He has maintained a plea of not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2027.

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/pro/live-nation-settlement-beyond-wonderland-shooting-lawsuit/)._