{"id":10758,"date":"2026-05-22T21:15:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T21:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-settles-lawsuit-claims-over-beyond-wonderland-shooting\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T21:15:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T21:15:05","slug":"live-nation-settles-lawsuit-claims-over-beyond-wonderland-shooting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/live-nation-settles-lawsuit-claims-over-beyond-wonderland-shooting\/","title":{"rendered":"Live Nation Settles Lawsuit Claims Over Beyond Wonderland Shooting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tLive 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. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a Wednesday (May 20) court filing, lawyers representing the estates of Brandy Escamilla and Josilyn Ruiz told a Seattle judge they\u2019ve \u201cresolved and settled all claims asserted\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\n

\t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n<\/h3>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDetails of the settlement have not been disclosed. Reps for Live Nation and the victims\u2019 estates did not immediately return requests for comment on Friday (May 22).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tLuksich\u2019s attorney, Tom\u00e1s Gahan<\/strong>, told Billboard <\/em>on Friday that the trial structure will be \u201clargely unchanged\u201d despite the Escamilla and Ruiz estates exiting the case.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe jury will still hear about Live Nation\u2019s 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,\u201d said Gahan. \u201cPredictably, they were unable to do so, and a mix of drugs and guns led to horrific outcomes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnother 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tLive Nation has argued that the tragic events at Beyond Wonderland were \u201cheinous, random acts of murder.\u201d The company says it could not have foreseen that Kelly, an upstanding Army service member with no known violent history, would go on an \u201cunprovoked homicidal rampage\u201d during a \u201cbad trip.\u201d It also says its security team\u2019s gun-sniffing dogs did in fact search Kelly\u2019s car when he entered the Gorge campground, but found nothing.<\/p>\n

\n\tKelly 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.<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[300,303,344,1206,322,2735,7216],"class_list":["post-10758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-claims","tag-lawsuit","tag-live","tag-nation","tag-settles","tag-shooting","tag-wonderland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}