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A second attendee at this weekend's Mad Decent Block Party festival at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia has died.
A 17-ear-old male from Woodbrige, northern Virginia, passed away on Friday (1 August) and is the second person to die of a suspected drug overdose at the event. The teenager's name has been withheld at the request of the family.
Twenty others were hospitalised after attending the concert which featured performances by Diplo, Sleigh Bells and Flux Pavilion, and 20-year-old Tyler Fox Viscardi was another victim of overdose, who was rushed from the concert to a hospital where he pronounced dead at around 9pm on 1 August.
Diplo tweeted about the incident saying: "our hearts go out to everyone impacted by yesterday's event. we are truly devastated."
Concert Promoter Seth Hurwitz, released a statement about the incident in which he said: "Our hearts go out to the family as they face the unimaginable. As a parent, it makes me horribly sad beyond words to think of a tragedy like this. We can spend every minute of the day making perfect sense to our children regarding the obvious perils of drugs, but sometimes it is impossible to convince them that this is relevant to their world. This particular type of incident is not the problem of those who should have known better...it's the problem of those too young to believe it could happen to them. Sadly we find ourselves in the classic position of trying to tell kids not to do something they think is fun."
