Photos of Ty Longley's five-week-old son were also taken last week. Left behind was a bitter note calling the slain musician a killer.

09:41 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 16, 2003

BY ZACHARY R. MIDER
Journal Staff Writer

Those who visit it say the site of The Station nightclub fire in West Warwick is sacred ground.

But even here there are fault lines, where grief collides with grief.

Sometime late last week, two crosses memorializing guitarist Ty Longley disappeared from the site. Longley's band, Great White, brought the pyrotechnics display that sparked the Feb. 20 fire; he was among the 100 people who died.

In place of Longley's crosses lay a note threatening to tear down any memorial left to the musician. It read in part: "My daughter memory will always mean to much to me to have her memory shared with her killer."

Journal photo / Bill Murphy Jodi King, of Warwick, whose brother died in The Station fire, puts up a welded cross memorializing Ty Longley at the site of the West Warwick blaze.

When he learned of the apparent theft, Jody King, a friend of Longley's girlfriend, said he was outraged. He arranged to have another cross built Sunday for Longley -- this time, of welded steel. He helped sink it in the ground, secured with three 80-pound bags of concrete.

The replacement cross, in the shape of a guitar, is a message to the apparent thief. "This is my way of letting her know that more than a few people are watching," said King, who believes the suspect is a woman. "It hurt a lot of other people. I'm just a mouthpiece."

King said he, too, is angry that so many people died here. But the makeshift memorials that have sprung up here are meant for remembrance, not for blame, he said. "Ty died here. He was someone's son. He was someone's dad. He was someone's soulmate."

King took the note to police headquarters in West Warwick yesterday, where the police took a report.

"I'm going to forward it to our detective division," police Lt. Albert A Giusti Jr. said. "They'll review it, and see where it takes us from there."

There might be difficulties trying to prosecute such a case, Giusti said. For one thing, the police have yet to establish who owned the items that were reported stolen -- King said several different people left items there.

Second, Giusti said, the fact that the items were left out in the open might make it hard to prosecute as a straightforward theft of property. The police keep an eye on the parcel, which is owned by Triton Realty Limited Partnership of Warwick, but those who leave tokens there do so "at their own peril," Giusti said.

Giusti said that given the sensitivity of the case, police detectives might need to consult with the attorney general's office as they determine how to proceed.

Journal photo / Bill Murphy The note that was left behind after a cross memorializing Great White guitarist Ty Longley was removed from the site of The Station nightclub fire.

King knew many of the 100 who died in the fire. His brother, Tracy, a bouncer at the club, was one of them. But he came to know about Ty Longley only two days after the fire, when he went to the West Warwick police station to file a report on his brother.

Longley's pregnant girlfriend, Heidi M. Peralta, had flown in from Chicago to file a similar report, and she was having a breakdown in the station, King recalls. He comforted her. They became friends. When Longley's Sept. 4 birthday approached, Peralta sent King a personalized wooden cross to leave at the site. It was one of the items King reported missing yesterday.

The other missing items, King said, include a crude wooden cross, one of 101 erected in a single day; photographs of Longley's son, Acey, to whom Peralta gave birth five weeks ago; and a teddy bear left in honor of Acey by a 12-year-old girl who often visits the site.

"Ty's an inncoent victim as well, " Peralta said in a phone interview last night from Chicago. "I can totally understand how she feels, because I'm a mother and I'm here all by myself with my son.

"I feel bad for her . . . but she's running her anger out in the wrong direction."

Reporter Zachary R. Mider can be reached at 277-8068 or zmider@projo.com