Frustrated Luke Bryan concert-goers bail on Atwater show after 3-hour waits

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17-05-2025

Reality Check is a Merced Sun-Star series holding those in power to account and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email [e-mail].
Jenny Hickman and a group of friends expected to spend Thursday night singing, dancing and having a memorable experience at the Luke Bryan Farm Tour 2025 stop at Castle Airport.
Instead, their girls' night turned into dinner at Chili's in Merced.
After waiting three hours in line to get into the concert, Hickman and her friends decided to leave and never made it through the entrance for the show.
'We could not wait, we had been talking about the concert for months,' Hickman said. 'We were so excited to go. We were with a younger girl, who was starting to get scared with everything happening around us so we decided to leave. We turned Chili's into our girls' night.'
After selling 20,000 tickets for the concert, the concert organizers were ill-equipped to accommodate that large of a crowd and usher the concert-goers safely and efficiently into the make-shift venue at Castle Airport, according to Hickman.
Social media started getting flooded with posts from people who had similar experiences of three-hour waits before giving up and leaving.
Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke blamed Bryan's concert team for having just one VIP entrance and one general admission gate for people to enter the venue.
'(Bryan's) people did not have their act together, as far as that was concerned,' Warnke said
According to Warnke, the concert staff told Undersheriff Corey Gibson that they would be able to admit 1,000 people per hour through the gate.
'My undersheriff pointed out there's 20,000 people coming, let's do some math,' Warnke said. 'My undersheriff kind of took the bull by the horns and opened 14 gates and started screening people in. There was thousands of people, literally, that left before the concert started because they couldn't get in.'
People that showed up later, closer to when Bryan went on stage around 9 p.m., didn't have to deal with the issues of long lines once more entrances were made available.
Jarrod Pimentel, his wife Myshel and their group, which included their two kids, were part of the earlier group that couldn't get in with too few fates open.
The Pimentels were excited to bring their kids to the concert, but after waiting hours in line their nine-year old daughter started getting scared when the line turned into a mob near the entrance and there was pushing and shoving. around them.
'That long line just turned into, like a massive mob at the gate,' Jarrod Pimentel said. 'People were just, kind of making their way to the front. We waited for another 45 minutes to an hour, and I, my wife and my daughter were just kind of done because they had been out in the sun for three hours. We never got in. We just left.'
Instead, the Pimentel's went to their ranch nearby and climbed up on haystacks and listened to the Luke Bryan Farm Tour 2025 at home.
'We were super excited, just because it's in Atwater and on the base and how much the base means,' Jarrod Pimentel said. 'If we didn't have our nine year old it might have been a little bit different, but we wanted our kids to experience it.'
For many, the concert was a great experience.
However, many people pointed to getting through the entrance as the main problem.
'As with any large scale event at any venue, there will always be challenges,' said Merced County Supervisor Daron McDaniel, who attended the concert. 'Our public safety professionals did a wonderful job and the economic impact to our community will prove to be significant. This was a great opportunity to highlight our county and fun was had by thousands upon thousands of people.'
McDaniel said he's heard from many people who had a great time, and he's also seen the posts on social media from people who had a horrible experience.
'I feel really bad for them,' McDaniel said. 'You never want to see that for anybody. But I was watching people, whole families, having a blast. Once you were in and everything was going, it was a really nice event.'
McDaniel said Merced County officials rented the facility and Luke Bryan's team ran the event. Castle Airport is the first of three stops on the Farm Tour. Bryan, an American Idol judge and five-time Country Music Awards Entertainer of the Year, is scheduled to perform at The Ponds at Harland Ranch in Clovis on Friday and Sillect Farms in Shafter on Saturday.
According to Warnke, only three people were arrested at the event.
'Out of 20,000 people showing up, I think that's a success to me,' Warnke said.
Warnke said there was about 100 to 120 law enforcement officers there from the sheriff's department, Atwater Police Department, Merced Police Department, CHP and members of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's mounted unit.
Warnke and his staff put out traffic advisories days leading up to the concert that there would be long delays in the area of Castle Air Force base. Warnke says there was traffic congestion for people leaving the concert until about 1:30 a.m., but that was expected.
The entrance fiasco was not anticipated.
'I think it could have been better,' Warnke said. 'I think the success of this event is a tell tale sign about how the people felt. And when you have that many people that are disgruntled, something's not right. They need to tweak it up, because I will tell you that the bad news is going to travel a lot faster.'
'From my perspective, their promoters sold the tickets, they made all their money, and it was like they didn't care about the people that were waiting in line. They don't care how they treat these people, and that's wrong. The people in this community deserved a lot better.'
If another similar event comes this way the Pimentels will have to think long and hard about whether they'll attend.
'If they decide to come back next year we'll probably just stay home,' he said.