|
12.21.2003
Life and Death
BY MICHAEL CORKERY and PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writers
The Station had everything a fire needed:
Walls of polyurethane foam. Air to feed the flames. And a band that opened its act with fireworks.
The people inside The Station had everything they wanted:
The chance to see the heavy-metal legend Great White. A beer salesman giving away free samples of Budweiser. And an excuse to get out of the house, at the end of a snowy week in February.
Mike Hoogasian and Skott Greene had free admission, courtesy of Jack Russell, Great White's lead singer.
Michael Ricardi and Jimmy Gahan, two college DJs, had a spot in the front row and an interview with Russell, taped earlier in the day.
Tom Medeiros had time off from the soap factory to spend at the concert with his girlfriend.
They may have had everything they wanted.
But they didn't have enough of what they needed:
Exits, oxygen or time.
THAT THURSDAY night, Feb. 20, Michael Shapiro had his first chance to play with Ty Longley, a Great White guitarist.
Before Great White took the stage, Shapiro and his band, Trip, dedicated their final song to Longley. "This one's for Ty," Shapiro announced.
The two musicians played Shapiro's guitar together. Shapiro strummed, while Longley formed the chords.
After the song, Shapiro put down his guitar, walked to a small room backstage and then meandered through the crowd.
It was a big night at the West Warwick club. There were at least 432 people inside. They hailed from 12 states, from as far away as California and Nevada. Most came from Rhode Island.
There were twice as many men as women.
They were predominately in their 30s, and ranged in age from 18 to 57.
By the time Great White took the stage, Shapiro, 33, was at the back of the room chatting with soundman Robert Rager, of Kent, Ohio.
At the side of the stage, tour manager Daniel M. Biechele, prosecutors say, triggered the fireworks that announced the start of the show. Great White took the stage, and white sparks shot into the air.
"I've seen this before," thought Shapiro, as he started to leave.
The fire had what it needed to begin.
The polyurethane foam used as soundproofing had a low density, like paper. It was easy to ignite.
The sparks -- thousands of hot metal bits -- hit the stage wall, which was covered in polyurethane foam used as soundproofing.
The heat of the sparks shattered the foam's complex molecules.
The foam's solid surface was transformed into flammable gases. The gases joined with oxygen atoms in the air, giving off light and heat that appeared as flame.
It was 11:07 p.m. The Station was on fire.
Shapiro did not notice. He wanted tea from the band's tour bus to soothe his tired vocal cords. So he strolled toward the main entrance.
He was the first person to leave the burning building.
KIMBERLY PHILLIPS hated crowds. So she stood far away from the stage, near the main entrance. She started to leave when she saw the first flame.
Phillips, of West Warwick, walked from the club's concert area into a smaller space where tickets for the show had been sold.
She turned left and continued out toward the main entrance, first through a set of double doors, then through a hallway -- about 10 feet long and 6 feet wide -- through another set of double doors, to the outside.
The hallway was a remnant of the building's years as a restaurant catering to smaller crowds.
Phillips, 35, said she walked past a club employee pulling a fire extinguisher from the wall. The extinguisher whacked her leg and bruised her.
Standing in the cold air, Phillips felt silly.
Great White was still playing. Only a few people were outside.
Brian Butler stood a few rows from the stage. A television cameraman at Channel 12 in Providence, he was shooting footage for a story on building safety. Jeffrey A. Derderian, a reporter at Channel 12, ran the nightclub with his brother, Michael.
Butler recorded the initial sparks of Great White's stage pyrotechnics, and then turned his camera toward the cheering crowd.
Five seconds later, the video shows, Butler turned the camera back to the stage. By then, two flames were climbing the wall behind the band.
Great White kept playing. Heads in the audience bounced to the beat. Fists pumped toward the stage. A fan extended his horned fingers in the heavy-metal salute.
Another fan waved with alarm.
She tried to get the attention of Great White's lead singer, Jack Russell. She pointed at the flame rising at the back of the stage.
Russell continued singing, unaware.
Dave Filice, the Great White bassist, noticed the flame over his shoulder. Guitarist Ty Longley turned his head.
The fire was growing quickly, helped by geometry: The foam lined the stage wall, and fire moves faster up a vertical surface.
As the hot gases rose, they turned more foam along the wall into gas.
Cooler air descended, bringing more oxygen to the flame. More heat. More rising gas. More oxygen. Around and around.
A deadly engine roared to life.
Brian Butler, his camera rolling, moved toward the main entrance.
SKOTT GREENE, a West Warwick tattoo artist, stood just off the main concert area, not far from the stage, in an area that some called the greenhouse.
On most nights people played pool there. To make room for vendors selling Great White merchandise during the show, the pool tables had been pushed against a bank of 11 curved windows.
Skott Greene had come to The Station with an employee from his tattoo parlor, Brian O'Donnell, of Warwick, and their friend Richard Cabral, a machine operator from Attleboro.
Greene had tattooed Jack Russell earlier in the day. The singer had put Greene on the guest list.
The three men spotted the flames and moved toward the front door. O'Donnell, 24, feared it would be too crowded, and doubled back toward the greenhouse. But Skott Greene, 35, and Richard Cabral, 37, followed the crowd to the main entrance.
Robin Tanzi, 37, and Kevin Pulley, 42, had spent much of the night in the greenhouse.
When the fire started, Pulley, an electrician from Providence, spotted the door that the band had used to enter the stage. He pulled Tanzi, of Warwick, to the door, to the right of the stage, and out of the club.
The exit sign above the stage door was not lit, the Channel 12 video shows.
Survivors also said that when they tried to leave through the stage door, they were stopped by a club employee working as a bouncer.
Rhode Island College student Michael Iannone said an employee standing in front of the stage door told him he couldn't go out that way. So Iannone followed the crowd to the front entrance, about 33 feet away.
Robert Feeney, 31, and his fiancée, Donna Mitchell, 29, tried to use the stage door, but the bouncer put up his hands.
This is only for the band, he said. So Feeney, of Plymouth, Mass., and Mitchell, of Fall River, went looking for another way out.
Alfred Crisostomi grabbed Gina Russo's hand and headed toward the stage door. The bouncer rebuffed them, Russo said. "It's on fire. It's on fire," she told him.
But the bouncer didn't seem to notice the fire, they said. He stood in front of the door with his arms folded. Crisostomi, 38, a painter from Warwick, and Russo, 35, a medical secretary at Rhode Island Hospital, followed the crowd to the main entrance.
Walter Castle, 29, said the bouncer told him the stage exit was for band members only. But Castle, of North Kingstown, didn't care. He pushed the bouncer out of the way and walked out the stage door.
As Great White kept playing its opening song, "Desert Moon," the flames grew thicker, pushing white smoke into the bar.
The crowd shuffled away from the stage, according to the Channel 12 video. The drummer stopped playing. Jack Russell's voice trailed off in mid-lyric. The guitar stopped squealing.
"Whoa," Russell said into the microphone. "That's not good."
Russell poured bottled water on the flames, survivors said.
The fire only devoured more foam, and more oxygen, in a self-feeding frenzy.
About 48 seconds after the fire's ignition, the video shows two members of Great White jumping off the stage.
Robert Rocha, of Acushnet, Mass., said he went out through the stage door without anyone stopping him. Rocha, 37, walked out just ahead of the band.
Great White's Eric Powers carried his drumsticks, and Dave Filice still had his bass guitar strapped to him when he emerged. The band gathered in the parking lot outside the stage door. Guitarist Mark Kendall was shivering. Jack Russell had made it out.
Someone counted heads.
"Where's Ty?"
AT FIRST, the crowd around the main entrance acted like passengers emerging from a subway car: tightly packed, but orderly.
Angela Ochs, 27, pulled her friend Cynthia Nobles from the second row to the front door. She was surprised that people didn't react more quickly.
Ochs, of Narragansett, said the people around her seemed stunned. Ochs was a designated driver for her friends that night. She was not drinking.
Before the nightclub's fire alarm sounded -- about 38 seconds after the start of the fire -- Ochs and Nobles walked out the main entrance.
That's just about the time Barry Ferreira, of Fall River, said he walked out the front door, easily and without delay.
Ferreira, 36, hoped the show would resume, once the fire department put out the fire. He grumbled to a friend: We paid 20 bucks and never got to see the main act.
Kristopher Somers, 25, of Pembroke, Mass., had bought a beer but never got to enjoy it.
Somers was at the front of the club, near the main entrance, when he saw the flames. He moved with the crowd through the two sets of doors. He was still holding his beer when he got outside.
Donald Trudeau stood in the main barroom -- a rectangular room, just off the main entrance -- 50 feet from the stage.
Five windows lined one of the barroom walls. On another wall, a door led outside.
Trudeau, 57, a salesman for the local Budweiser distributor, McLaughlin & Moran, watched Jeffrey Derderian serving beer behind the bar.
A half-scared, half-annoyed look came over the nightclub owner's face. Derderian darted from the barroom toward the stage.
Trudeau thought it was a fight. He turned toward the stage, looking for a melee. He saw flames.
From the barroom, Anthony Kolasa, 34, a lighting technician at Foxwoods, and his friend Kenneth Campagnone, of North Providence, watched the flames climb on stage.
"This don't look right," said Campagnone, 30.
As the fire grew, a toxic brew of soot, smoke and flammable chemicals crawled along the ceiling.
While oxygen was becoming scarce near the ceiling, it was near normal levels closer to the floor. People could still survive there. The air was relatively cool.
Campagnone started heading toward the main entrance. But Kolasa pulled him back, knowing that the closest way out was right behind them. They walked out the barroom door.
Eric Williams, 30, was about 10 feet from the front of the stage when the fire started. He tapped his friend, Edward Ervanian, 29, on the shoulder. They used to work together at Stop & Shop stores in Coventry and Narragansett. "I'm getting out of here," Williams told his friend.
He walked first toward the main entrance, and then saw the crowd forming.
He had been to The Station at least six times, including a Great White show in April 2000, and had seen club workers use the barroom door to take out the trash.
Williams navigated through the main concert area, walked around the U-shaped bar and out the barroom door.
He never saw his friend Edward Ervanian again.
"JULIE, get out. Get out now."
Bartender Julie Mellini, who was serving drinks from a second, smaller bar off the main concert area, heard the shouts. It was Paul Vanner, the club's sound manager.
Mellini, 34, grabbed the cash register drawer and her bucket of tips and headed for a door at the back of the kitchen.
The kitchen door was hidden from the main concert area, known mostly to club employees and regulars at The Station.
Cradling the register drawer under one arm, Mellini ran out the door and down three cement steps. She looked back into the kitchen. And that's when it hit her.
"Like this big black monster coming at me," Mellini said.
The gray smoke had turned thick and black.
The fire had spread rapidly, and it was now outpacing its air supply, choking itself -- and everyone left inside the nightclub.
As the fire found less and less oxygen, the smoke became thicker and blacker, filling with chemicals that had yet to burn.
John Arpin ran from the stage to the kitchen, trying to find water to put out the fire.
He soon gave up and ran back into the club, yelling for people to follow him into the kitchen. He worried that the door leading out was locked.
Arpin, 32, reached back to grab his jacket, and then turned again to the door. It had disappeared in the smoke. "I didn't know what was up and what was down."
Arpin, of West Warwick, pushed ahead and burst through the door.
Waitress Dina DeMaio also headed for the kitchen door.
DeMaio, of West Warwick, worked as a legal secretary at Textron, in Providence, and had taken a few shifts at The Station. The single mother liked to spend the extra money on her 7-year-old son.
Irina Gershelis, another waitress, saw DeMaio turn toward the club's office, where employees sometimes kept their coats and purses.
DeMaio, who turned 30 that day, would not make it out.
Julie Mellini was still holding the register drawer when she saw club owner Jeffrey Derderian in the parking lot outside the kitchen.
Derderian would not speak to The Journal for this story and it is not known how the nightclub owner got out.
Outside, Mellini remembered Derderian saying one thing: "Help people."
She gave Derderian the register drawer, and walked to the front of the club, looking for her friend Linda Fisher.
ARTHUR ZANFAGNA had ordered a beer from Mellini, but never got the chance to pay.
When the fire started, he walked toward the main entrance. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said: "Hey, guy, back door."
Zanfagna, an assistant manager at the Home Depot in Somerset, turned and headed toward the door in the barroom.
Then, Zanfagna, 33, observed what many people inside The Station remember as a turning point: The lights went out.
It's possible that an electrical failure, caused by the searing heat, could have cut the lights.
Robert Feeney heard the stage lights pop and shatter.
For certain, billowing smoke reduced the visibility to near zero.
Black plumes rolled into the barroom, like giant waves, lapping the back wall and flowing over the crowd.
As the fire consumed oxygen, the orange flames also dimmed -- further darkening the inside of the club.
John McNulty, 32, of Coventry, said it was so dark that he thought for a moment the fire was out.
Whatever the cause, the darkness turned the orderly exodus into chaos. In an instant, patrons went from thinking they would escape to fearing they would die.
ABOUT 59 SECONDS after the fire started, smoke reached the enclosed ticket area near the main entrance -- about 33 feet from the stage.
To get out, the crowd there was challenged to move through the ticket area, the inner double doors, the hallway, and then the outer double doors.
The Station's outside doors opened to a concrete platform, bounded by a metal railing.
The evacuation started slowly and steadily, with people emerging shoulder-to-shoulder in rows of twos and threes. As the smoke reached the main entrance, the crowd surged to outrun the fire.
Mark Knott, a West Warwick police officer, was on patrol and had stopped at The Station that night. The surging crowd pushed him out the front door, over the railing and onto the hood of a car.
Getting up, Knott, 33, transmitted a message into his radio:
"Stampede."
Jennifer Stowers, a third-grade teacher from South Boston, was shoved out the front door and against the railing.
The human wave landed Jacqueline Bernard, a housekeeper at the Fairfield Inn in Warwick, on the platform on her hands.
West Warwick Ptlm., Anthony Bettencourt, 31, was swept through the main entrance. The force of the crowd snapped his radio receiver off his shoulder.
Jose Demos, 33, a janitor from Lowell, Mass., had been waving people toward the main entrance. His 6-foot-3-inch frame had stood like a beacon in the front of the club. In the rush, Demos fell in the ticket area.
All around him, people were tripping and falling. He got up and ran out the front door.
Behind him, the ticket area and the hallway between the two sets of doors became a tangle of humanity.
Steven Tavares, 40, a cook from West Warwick, was stuck behind a pile of people, screaming for help and struggling for air. Smoke filled the entryway between the sets of double doors. He was only a few feet away from safety.
"I'm going to die here," he thought.
LINDA FISHER and Debra Wagner crouched under a table in the greenhouse area, hiding from the smoke and the crowd.
"We'll never get out the front door," Fisher told Wagner. "We'll get crushed."
They didn't know where to turn.
People improvised.
Gregory Dufour, of Coventry, kicked at a greenhouse window with his steel-toed boot. The windows were made of double thermal-pane glass; at least some were painted black. He kicked the window seven or eight times. It didn't break. Dufour picked up something -- it felt like a clay pot -- and he used it to break through.
Dufour, 38, jumped out. Fisher, 33, of Cranston, reached her hands through the broken window and someone pulled her out.
The Channel 12 video shows someone kicking out a panel in one of the greenhouse windows.
Someone picked up a chair and smashed through a window, according to survivors.
Chad Ochs, 29, stumbled in darkness through the main concert area. He had no sense of direction. "It's over for me," he thought.
Angela Ochs, his wife, had already made it out.
His friend, Ed Nobles, 31, was somewhere inside.
Ochs, a technician at Electric Boat, was swept with the crowd against one of the broken windows in the greenhouse. Ochs covered his face with a jacket and burst outside.
William Long, the manager of Trip, the band that had opened for Great White, jumped on a pool table that had been pushed against the greenhouse windows. He kicked at a window pane with his "Harley boots." It wouldn't break.
Long, 31, was with Ty Longley, the Great White guitarist. Longley had jumped off the stage and the two friends had moved together into the greenhouse.
"Give me your guitar," Long said. "I'll smash the window."
The ceiling was melting and dripping on Long's back. Through a window, someone shouted:
"Anyone in there?"
The crowd rushed toward the window, pushing Long outside. In the parking lot, someone asked about Longley. "He's right next to me," Long said. "He was just right there."
Andrea Stewart was knocked to the greenhouse floor. Just before the fire, Stewart had left the nightclub so her friend, Leigh Ann Moreau, could buy cigarettes. Moreau wanted to hurry back, worried she would miss Great White.
Now, in the smoke, Stewart couldn't find Moreau.
Stewart moved her arms, "like someone under water trying to swim to the surface." Then, she climbed out a greenhouse window.
Theresia LaBree, 42, of Pawtucket, was running out of air. She saw a light coming from a broken window, fell against the greenhouse wall and passed out.
John Pinkham jumped out a window. Then, he reached back inside, felt around with his hand and grabbed LaBree's leather jacket.
He hauled her out the window and put her in a snowbank.
Pinkham ran to the main entrance. People were wedged in a pile at the front door.
ERIN PUCINO, of North Kingstown, was stuck in the pile. Her face was outside the main entrance. She was breathing fresh air.
But she was trapped from the waist down in a thicket of people, jammed in the door frame.
Twin sisters -- Lisa Ann and Cara Ann Del Sesto from Johnston -- pulled on Pucino's arms, but she did not budge.
"We'll get you out," the twins said. "We're not gonna let go." But the metal railing prevented the Del Sestos, both 27, from getting enough leverage.
Pucino, 25, let go of the twins and grabbed a man's tattooed arms. As he pulled, Pucino wiggled her legs. "Please keep pulling," she pleaded.
Pucino popped free and rolled into the parking lot. She tried to stand up, but her legs were numb.
The tug of war was frantic.
Rescuers pulled at the limbs in the pile, as the fire roared to consume the oxygen at the main entrance. They used the metal railing to brace themselves as they pulled.
It was getting hotter.
Robert Cripe, of West Warwick, took off his leather jacket as he yanked at his girlfriend at the bottom of the pile. He finally rescued Sharon Wilson -- pulling her out of her shoes and pants.
Jason Nadeau, 27, joined the rescue at the main entrance. Through the smoke, he saw Andrea Mancini, 28, a part-time club employee from Johnston, still behind the ticket booth. Nadeau said she was standing there calmly.
Derderian, the Channel 12 video shows, walked to the railing at the main entrance and tried to pull down a promotional banner that was hampering rescuers.
By the time Warwick shellfisherman Richard DelSanto, 30, broke free of the pile, the metal railing was too hot to touch.
IN THE BARROOM, Arthur Zanfagna pushed and pushed, but couldn't get the door open.
The fire had consumed much of the oxygen inside the building, and the outside air was trying to rush in. The bar door opened slightly, then slammed shut. As Zanfagna pushed against the door, he sensed that air pressure was fighting against him.
Zanfagna heard a window break nearby in the bar. It seemed to ease the pressure on the door. Zanfagna and a dozen people behind him burst out into the cold night.
"It was like a funnel. You just got sucked out the door," said Seth Dinger, 21, a shipfitter from Louisiana.
Marlene Raphael, 46, of East Freetown, Mass., waited in a line at the main bar door. When the bar went dark, she said, the screaming crowd rushed the door "like a freight train."
Raphael could no longer see her friend, Dale Latulippe, 46, of Carver, Mass., who had stood just off the small bar, near some dartboards, when the fire started. Latulippe had gone toward the club's office, looking for an exit, one he would never find.
In the thick smoke, Raphael couldn't even see her hands. She took a deep breath, and covered her nose and mouth. She was pushed out the door.
Michael Ricardi and Jimmy Gahan, student DJs at Nichols College, had interviewed Jack Russell the afternoon of the show. Russell had put them on the guest list.
They had started out near the stage. As the club turned black with smoke, Ricardi, 19, and Gahan, 21, separated. Ricardi tried to keep his cool, as the crowd swept him into the main barroom and knocked him to the floor.
Everyone around Ricardi was yelling. He could not hear Jimmy Gahan's voice in the darkness.
The barroom door, like the front door, was jammed with people.
Robin Petrarca, 44, grabbed the frame of the barroom door and tried to pull herself outside. She fell back into the crowd.
Petrarca, of Warwick, lay face-to-face on the floor with a stranger. People piled on top of her. Her injuries recorded the chaos: a boot print on her upper thigh and a large bruise on her chest.
Petrarca lay on the floor, yelling: "You've got to help me. I can't breathe."
STEFANIE SIMPSON ran from the stage to the restrooms, looking for her friend Lisa Scott, 33, of Johnston.
The restrooms were off the main concert area, at the end of a dead-end hallway, away from the exits.
Simpson, 30, is the only survivor who has described the scene inside the restrooms during the fire.
"Lisa, we've got to get out of here," she said. From inside a stall, someone responded: "There is no Lisa in here."
A woman emerged from the stall, fastening her pants. Simpson grabbed her hand and pulled the woman into the concert hall.
"There's no time. Let's go," said Simpson, a technician at Hasbro Children's Hospital.
Bridget Sanetti, a 25-year-old teacher in Woonsocket, and a friend had gone to the restroom before the fire. At some point, she made a call from her cell phone.
Her uncle retrieved the phone among her possessions; the last number Bridget Sanetti dialed was 911.
THE PEOPLE in the main bar needed another way out.
While Arthur Zanfagna worked on getting the barroom door open, Shamus Horan tried breaking one of the five windows, though he feared it would bring more oxygen to the fire.
But with the thick smoke roiling and the bar jammed with people, Horan started kicking at a window. The window would not break. He threw his body at it, and crashed through. He landed on the handicapped ramp outside.
John "Jack" Rezendes watched as people kicked the bar windows, their feet just bouncing off.
Rezendes, a cook from Jamestown, couldn't breath. He dropped to his knees and crawled along the floor to the window.
In the smoke, the window disappeared.
Rezendes, 40, kept crawling until he finally reached the window Horan had broken. He climbed half-way out. His leather jacket snagged on the broken glass. Someone pushed him out onto the ramp.
Mario Cardillo, 34, a construction worker from Providence, wrapped his leather jacket around his fist and tried to break the middle window, the largest of the windows in the main bar. The window would not break.
He moved on and found an open window and jumped out. His wife, Kathleen Cardillo, tried to follow. But there was a struggle, and she was pulled back into the barroom. Kathleen Cardillo, 34, fell to the floor and was trampled.
Through the open window, she could hear Mario calling her name.
Someone used a bar stool to break the middle window. Kathleen Cardillo stood up and moved to the opening. Her husband pulled her out.
Victoria Potvin, 27, a mortgage account executive from West Warwick, fell on the barroom floor, choking in the smoke -- a black cloud of flammable gases.
The heat caused the temperature of the gases in the smoke to rise and ignite into orange flame. Potvin watched the flames roll across the barroom ceiling. "I'm going to die right here on the floor," she thought.
Peter Christensen, 39, stood just feet away from freedom.
He fumbled through the dark barroom, patting his hands against the wall. He knew the door was only a few feet away. But the smoke was so thick, he couldn't see it.
"I'm at the door and I can't get out," thought Christensen of Pawtucket.
Christensen couldn't take many more breaths of smoke. "I've got to get out of here. I've got a wife and kids."
He patted his way along the windowless wall of the main bar, until he felt the door, which was jammed with people. As he pulled himself over the pile, his leg became stuck in the scrum.
Christensen used both hands to pull his leg free.
He turned and tried to pull at the other arms in the pile.
The longer the barroom door stayed open, the more oxygen poured into the club, feeding the fire. The broken windows also created new sources of oxygen.
The fire was getting what it needed.
THE RIGHT SIDE of Arthur "Jamie" Conway's face was getting burned and his shoes started to melt.
The fire had reached the front door.
Adam Tanzi was stuck under the pile, while the people around him burned. Tanzi, 24, was pulled free, unscathed. A Wal-Mart security guard, Tanzi walked to his car, got inside and drove home.
Jason Nadeau grabbed a fire extinguisher from a man in the parking lot. Nadeau told him he was in the National Guard. "We got a door full of people on fire," he yelled.
Nadeau doused the people in the pile, extinguishing the flames.
Super-heated gases were swirling through the front foyer, reaching temperatures that far exceeded the ignition point of most clothing.
The pile caught fire again.
Laurie Hussey, 33, of North Kingstown, could feel the lace burning on her shirt-sleeves.
David Brennan could feel his head and back burning. "I felt like a baked potato in a microwave," he said.
The Station had reached flashover -- the moment when material inside the nightclub became hot enough to burst into flames. Furniture, carpeting, plastic beer cups, clothing and hair ignited.
Brennan thought how angry his wife would be if she knew he had not taken his last chance to survive.
Brennan, 32, of West Warwick, used a burst of strength to jump over the pile. As he lept, someone grabbed his leg. He ended up on top, near the ceiling, the hottest layer in the building.
Brennan ripped off his shark-tooth necklace and clasped it in his fist. He wanted to preserve something for his family to remember him by.
Then his sneakers popped off.
Brennan rolled over the pile and out the door.
IN THE GREENHOUSE, Robert Feeney lay on the floor; Donna Mitchell, his fiancée, lay near him.
The bouncer had turned them away from the stage door. They tried to reach the main entrance, but the crowd knocked them down. They got back up. Black smoke enveloped them, and they collapsed again.
Feeney called out Donna Mitchell's name. She did not move.
People tripped over her legs. She still didn't move.
Fire scorched Feeney's skin and smoke seared his lungs. He didn't know which was more painful, the fire or the smoke.
The screams had all but ceased. The Station was nearly silent.
Feeney had lost sight of their friends: Mary Baker, 32, of Fall River; Kathleen Sullivan, 31, of Swansea; and Pamela Gruttadauria, 33, of Johnston. Feeney curled into the fetal position, next to Mitchell. He wanted the pain to stop.
But then, as if pulled by a leash, Feeney crawled toward the greenhouse window.
THE FLAMES spread to the barroom.
The hot air burned Stefanie Simpson's throat. She still could not find Lisa Scott, her friend who went to the restroom before the show. There was no more time to search.
Simpson crawled along the floor and prayed: "Oh God, don't take me, but if you do, do it quickly."
She moved toward the sound of breaking glass. She reached out the window. Bettencourt, the West Warwick patrolman, pulled her out.
Mario Giamei Jr., 38, of Sutton, Mass., occassionally worked as a bouncer at The Station, but had come to the Great White show as a fan.
After the fire started, Giamei and Dan Biechele made their way outside through the stage door, and circled around to the barroom door. Biechele, who is accused of setting off the fireworks, tried to go back into the nightclub, but Giamei said he stopped him.
Kevin Beese, the club manager, and Joseph Barber, a carpenter from West Warwick, crawled on their bellies back into the club, through the barroom door. In the smoke, they yelled for people to follow their voices.
They made it as far as the horseshoe-shaped bar. There, they felt a blast of heat -- like the opening of an oven door, but 40 times hotter. A girl fell near Barber, 30. She was screaming and burning. He couldn't reach her.
Ashley Poland, 21, kept passing out, and her boyfriend Tommy Woodmansee, 30, kept waking her up. They walked past the jam at the main entrance and into the barroom.
Poland, of South Kingstown, passed out again. Someone stepped on her knee, dislocating it. Her nose started to burn.
Woodmansee, an electrician from Charlestown, led her to the barroom windows and someone pulled her out.
She expected Woodmansee to come through the window after her, so she walked over to his truck to wait for him. She wanted to call him, but her cell phone was inside the truck and the doors were locked.
Gary Beineke dove through a bar window. He thought his wife, Pam, would follow. She did not.
Beineke, 41, a lawyer from Sharon, Mass., stood outside the bar windows, looking into the black smoke for Pam, 40, a registered nurse.
He helped one person out the window, and then another.
There was no sign of Pam.
"I am going to have to go back inside," he thought. "That's when people die, when they go back inside."
Pam appeared at the window. Beineke yanked her out by the shoulders. The top of her hair was singed.
Beineke led his wife away from the window; only two more people came out.
Looking in, Beineke saw flames streaking sideways through the club.
Fire doesn't move like that, he thought. People do.
FLAMES BURST out the windows and through the roof.
The fire had the perfect mixture of fuel and heat. Temperatures had reached nearly 2,000 degrees. The flames, climbing into the night sky, had a limitless supply of oxygen. The Station burned like a bonfire.
The number of people getting out slowed to a trickle.
"Is anybody there?" Harold Panciera, of Hope Valley, yelled into the darkness of the kitchen door.
From inside, a man answered: "I'm on fire. I can't walk." Panciera couldn't see anything through the smoke.
He grabbed snow and threw it inside the door. The man moved toward the snow, and emerged from the smoke.
Panciera, 35, carried the man on his shoulder to the parking lot.
Through interviews, The Journal identified only 12 survivors who used the kitchen exit. Hidden from the main club area, it was the least-used exit during the fire.
Not many more people escaped from the stage door. The Journal identified 20 in all.
At least five people, according to survivors, had been turned away from the stage door by the bouncer. Two of them died. Three were severely injured.
One of the injured was Robert Feeney, who escaped through a greenhouse window. Outside, firefighters covered him with snow to cool his burns.
The Journal identified 25 survivors who escaped through the greenhouse windows. There were no exit doors in the greenhouse.
Near the main entrance, the Channel 12 video shows Biechele feeding hose to firefighters as they rushed to get water on the people stuck in the front door.
The Journal identified 90 survivors who got out through the front door, the scene of the massive pileup. Many of those in the pile died, but not all.
Raul Vargas, 31, of Johnston, was stuck near the bottom of the pile, shielded from the flames. He said he lived in a pocket of cool oxygen-rich air, being drawn into the fire near the floor.
Gina Gauvin, 42, of Johnston, passed out at the bottom of the pile. The cold water from the fire hoses woke her up.
From deep inside the pile, John Van Deusen, 39, of Carver, Mass., saw a firefighter's boot, grabbed hold, and survived.
About 100 survivors escaped through the barroom; 54 of them went through the windows.
Richard Sanetti, 38, of Coventry, pulled some of the last people out.
Sanetti grabbed a man from the bar window. The man was silent, the skin melting off his body. But he had a determined look.
"Hang on, dude. Don't let go," Sanetti told him.
A West Warwick police officer came over, and told Sanetti to let the man go. "I ain't leaving this guy," Sanetti yelled.
But the man was already dead.
Sanetti set him on the ground, and went back to the fire. He grabbed another man at the window. His watch seared Sanetti's hand.
This man was dead, too.
So were Donna Mitchell, Robert Feeney's fiancée.
Ty Longley, Great White's guitarist.
Tommy Woodmansee, whose girlfriend waited by his truck.
Skott Greene, the artist who tattooed the lead singer.
Tom Medeiros, who had the day off.
Mike Hoogasian, who had a free ticket.
And Jimmy Gahan, the college kid who earlier in the day had interviewed Jack Russell, the aging rocker whose small-town act opened with fireworks.
It all took about six minutes.
With staff reports by: Liz Anderson, Lynn Arditi, Mark Arsenault, Daniel Barbarisi, Timothy C. Barmann, Katherine Boas, Linda Borg, Kate Bramson, Tracy Breton, Gerald M. Carbone, John Castellucci, Cathleen F. Crowley, Karen A. Davis, Paul Davis, Richard C. Dujardin, C. Eugene Emery Jr., Erin Emlock, Lisa Biank Fasig, Edward Fitzpatrick, Felice J. Freyer, Elizabeth Gudrais, Louisa Handle, Andrew C. Helman, John Hill, Jenny Holland, Jennifer D. Jordan, Alex Kuffner, Bruce Landis, Jennifer Levitz, Peter B. Lord, Scott MacKay, Gina Macris, W. Zachary Malinowski, Robert Margetta, Megan Matteucci, Scott Mayerowitz, David McFadden, Michael P. McKinney, Dave McPherson, Zachary R. Mider, Amanda Milkovits, G. Wayne Miller, Tom Mooney, Thomas J. Morgan, Katie Mulvaney, Mark Patinkin, Alisha A. Pina, Tatiana Pina, Barbara Polichetti, Jessica Resnick-Ault, Mark Reynolds, S.I. Rosenbaum, Richard Salit, Neil Shea, Mike Stanton, Andrea Stape, Meaghan Wims and Karen Lee Ziner.
Monday: The Legacy
| 
