- A woman, 24, from New York was paralyzed when a singer crowd surfed onto her
- Bird Piché was struck by the singer, John Floreani of the band Trophy Eyes
- The incident resulted in a catastrophic spinal cord injury
A young woman from New York state has been paralyzed and is only able to move her arms and communicate by text, after a singer at the concert she was attending attempted to crowd surf and landed on top of her.
Bird Piché, 24, fell to the floor the moment singer John Floreani, of Australian punk rock band Trophy Eyes, jumped into the mosh pit at the gig in Buffalo.
Footage shared online sees the moment Floreani took a leap into the crowd – a stunt he often performs during concerts.
Although Piché can’t be seen in the footage, she was stuck by Floreani during the stunt within minutes of the first song of the set starting at Buffalo’s Mohawk Place.
The show was immediately stopped and Floreani accompanied Piché in the ambulance to hospital.
‘The video is wild because unless you knew that someone was hurt in the video, you’d never expect that. Like it’s just an average stage dive. The video that I saw on Facebook and then another angle surfaced on a Reddit thread, both of them just seem fairly innocuous,’ friend of the family Wolter Tejera said to WGRZ.
But the dive was devastating and Piché suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury and she was forced to undergo extensive surgery.
‘She has a long recovery ahead and will need all the help she can get. It is still too early to know what her prognosis is but after leaving the hospital she will need to go to a rehab facility. She will obviously not be able to work during this time,’ a GoFundMe page explained, which has so far raised $53,000.
The fundraiser’s organizer, a close family friend, said the woman has already undergone ‘extensive surgery’.
‘It is still too early to know what her prognosis is but after leaving the hospital she will need to go to a rehab facility. She will obviously not be able to work during this time.’
Her friend, Tejera, is still attempting to understand how Piché was so badly hurt.
‘He stage dove into the crowd, and there must just not have been enough people around there to catch him, or they weren’t aware that he was going to jump. And that was kind of it from then,’ Tejera explained.
‘A couple of people said they they thought she had fainted, so they went to grab her a cold rag. And then when they came back, they realized she was on the ground. She wasn’t getting up and John, the singer, was was like right there with her. So yeah, they took her right to the hospital into emergency trauma surgery, and then she was admitted.’
The band said in a statement they were ‘truly heartbroken’ by the incident but have decided to continue their 2024 US tour and made a $5,000 donation towards Piché’s medical expenses.
‘This situation has shaken us all to our core, and we ask for patience while we look to help Bird navigate this difficult time. Please, keep Bird in your thoughts,’ the statement read.
One commenter who claimed to be standing behind Piché as Floreani dove from the stage said the singer was ‘clearly devastated’ after realizing he’d hurt her.
‘My partner and I were directly beside her. As soon as we heard her say she was scared and couldn’t move we knew it wasn’t good. John was clearly devastated,’ they wrote.
‘Yeah once the crowd went silent and I heard her say “I’m scared” I immediately knew whatever just happened was not good’, added another.