Digital Extra: The Station Fire

10:19 AM EST on Saturday, February 21, 2004

BY MICHAEL CORKERY, CATHLEEN F. CROWLEY and JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writers

Raymond and Diane Mattera slip quietly into the church, holding the hand of their 10-year-old grandson, Nathan.

At this early morning Mass, a short service so parishioners can get to work on time, there is no procession or organ music. There are only prayers.

The Matteras walk to the front of SS. Rose and Clement Church, in Warwick. Their family fills four pews. They have come to remember Tammy Mattera-Housa, Nathan's mother. She was 29, and one of the 100 concertgoers who died in the Station nightclub fire on Feb. 20, 2003.

The Rev. Robert Marciano opens the service, memorializing Mattera-Housa and Michael E. Cordier, of Westerly, who also died in the fire, with a simple request: "Lord, be my rock."

This is how the first anniversary begins for some, in the comfort of a family parish.

Others remember at gravesides, in coffee shops, and in their homes, surrounded by old pictures and new flowers.

They remember with each time they move burned hands struggling to work again. Some spend the gray February day trying to forget.

Father Marciano assures them they are not alone in their grief. A chaplain for the Rhode Island National Guard and the Warwick Fire and Police Departments, he tells the story of a soldier injured in World War II who faced an operation without anesthesia. The soldier asked that the operation take place on an altar. He wanted to be able to see the cross.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl ONE YEAR LATER: Ashley Morton, 17, of West Greenwich, hugs her boyfriend, Dan Autier, near a memorial honoring her father, Station nightclub fire victim Jason Morton, and his best friend, Thomas Barnett, last night at the fire site in West Warwick. Services were held across the state yesterday to mark the anniversary of the worst fire in Rhode Island history.

Marciano says God could provide the same comfort to those hurting now.

"Help us know that you are with us even when our cross is heavy," the pastor says.

Diane Mattera dabs at her cheeks with a tissue; Raymond Mattera wears a blue suit and a black tie. On his lapel is a gold butterfly and a pin from the National Fire Sprinkler Association.

Tammy Mattera-Housa's other son, Nicholas, arrives with his father a few minutes later. He turned 3 in July. The family walks up to take communion together. Marciano blesses Nicholas, tugs at his arm and smiles.

By 7:20 a.m., the Mass has ended. Some parishioners leave the church and head to work. The Matteras remain for a final prayer.

"Lord, give consolation to the families who have lost loved ones. Give healing to the victims that still suffer from pain."

An angel He put out silk flowers on a weekday.

Usually, Jason Loffredo puts bouquets of flowers outside Loffredo's Monumental Decor on weekends, when he knows people will be visiting St. Ann Cemetery up the street. But it was the anniversary of the Station fire, so he put out the flowers.

By 10:25 a.m., the bouquets are going, as are silk-flower hearts: "Made from scratch," he says.

Loffredo is outside, in the yard of this family owned business in Cranston. His cap is turned backward, his jeans dirty with glue. He wears only a sweatshirt in the bleak chill, for his is a physical job -- crafting gravestones.

He leads the way to one of his stones, and runs a hand over the black granite marker on a crate. He brushes away the powder, which rises in the winter wind.

At the top left corner is an image of a young woman with an open smile and short hair. It is Abbie Hoisington, who was 28 when she died in the Station fire.

Loffredo props one boot up on the crate, puts his hands in his back pockets.

"If you knew Abbie," he says, "it looks just like her."

"I went to high school with her."

Cranston East. They were in the same home room.

He strokes one side of the granite.

"We want to put an angel here."

Boy with a guitar Nearby, the wrought iron gates of St. Ann Cemetery are open.

Sarah Mancini steers her red Honda Accord away from the main entrance, to a less-traveled one near the parish elementary school. She knows the shortcut to her son's grave.

Her radio is turned down. She heard someone on air speculate about what those trapped inside the burning West Warwick nightclub might have felt in their final moments. She won't let her mind imagine. On the left rear window is a sticker: "The Station 02/20/03. We will remember."

One year later, she is thinking about the last time she talked to her son, Keith Mancini, the last time she wished him well, the last time she saw him so excited for his band, Fathead, which was opening for Great White the night of the fire. They could get discovered, he told his mother, and so, as she goes to the cemetery, she thinks of her son as a little boy, playing his music to a boom box in the cellar, and she thinks of him never giving up his rock-star dreams. She thinks about that last phone call.

Inside the cemetery, bare trees line the roads, and the ponds are gloomy with ice. She crosses the little bridge, as she calls it, parks the car and walks to stone 784. She brings fresh flowers tied with a lilac ribbon.

"Beloved Son, Keith A. Mancini, July 31, 1968--Feb. 20, 2003."

Someone had left Keith a 20-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, his favorite.

Sarah Mancini sets down her flowers and picks up the soda, clutching the bottle as if it were prayer beads. Under the muted blue sky, she is a bright figure in a long red coat, swaying slightly side to side as if hearing an imaginary song. Now and then, she raises a gloved hand to lift her dark glasses and wipe her eyes.

"It's lonely here," she says, "I know he's not even here. He's up there dancing with angels and giving them his glow sticks and playing his guitar."

Through a row of naked trees she can see more cars turning into the cemetery.

She talked to Keith this morning at his graveside: "Look at the love and prayers that are going out to you and all your friends. You won't be forgotten."

She sets down the Mountain Dew, and twists a tissue in her hand. "That's my biggest wish, that's he's not forgotten."

The healing

Miles away, across the state line, someone who survived is learning how to live after the fire.

It starts at 11 a.m., when John Van Deusen arrives at the New Bedford Rehabilitation Hospital.

Each day, his father picks him up in Carver, Mass., and drives him to his physical-therapy session. Van Deusen, 40, has done this five days a week, since May.

Inside the hospital, Van Deusen meets Dwayne Elliott, a burly therapist with a quick wit and a kind smile. He's the man helping put Van Deusen back together.

When rescue workers pulled Van Deusen from the Station that night, the skin slid off his arms and fused on his hands. He's had multiple operations to separate the fingers. But if he wants to use his hands again, Van Deusen has to keep stretching and bending his fingers -- every day with Elliott.

"Relax," Elliott says.

"I'm trying, but man, it hurts," Van Deusen says.

Elliott is pulling at Van Deusen's middle finger, which has curled under. The scar tissue that has grown over his burns is tough and difficult to bend. During therapy, the skin often breaks and bleeds.

"It's part of the healing process," says Elliott. "The body keeps sending out signals to grow more skin. In some ways that works for him and in others it works against him."

The two men work for an hour. Van Deusen props his arms on two white towels. Elliott pulls and pushes his fingers. Van Deusen winces and chews furiously on a piece of gum. Van Deusen says he thinks of Elliott as his brother.

The men look for distractions from the pain. Today they swap ideas for insulating Elliott's new garage. Van Deusen worked as a mechanic before the fire.

He says he's trying not to dwell on the fire. "I'm not making this my D-Day for life," he says. "I am not going to sit in a closet crying. I am trying to live life day to day."

Van Deusen has no plans to attend any memorial today. He's going out to dinner with friends.

At 11:50 a.m., Elliott wraps Van Deusen's hand in gauze. They will meet again on Monday.

'A sorrowful year'

Bishop Robert E. Mulvee, the state's Roman Catholic leader, has called for a memorial Mass at noon.

The heavy maroon doors of St. Ann Church in Cranston are open, and there is a shuffle of high heels and dress shoes on the walkway outside.

The brick church was built in 1858, and its thick walls hold history. Today's history is palpable.

"Nanny's a wreck," says one woman to another.

Annette Feeney has come to support her best friend, Nancy DePasquale, whose brother, Alfred Carmano Crisostomi, died in the West Warwick fire.

The friends, both 37, greet each other outside the church and are soon joined by Freddie's cousins. He was the big brother in their Silver Lake neighborhood in Providence.

"We played together, fought together . . . we would throw his baseball in the sewer," Feeney says.

The church bells sound, and mourners and dignitaries, including Governor Carcieri, fill most of the wooden pews inside. Some exchange hugs, others sit alone, their eyes cast down, or looking up where the ceiling fans cast dancing shadows across the curved ceiling. A baby coos. They sing, "We will rise again."

Bishop Mulvee says it has been "a painful and a sorrowful and a suffering year." He prays for those who died, and for the people before him.

He prays that "God will be your comforter and strength in the days, the months, and years that lie ahead."

Family gathering It is after lunchtime, in Johnston, and a family is reflecting privately at home.

The Jacavone family lives next to Jacavone Garden Center, up a long driveway. It is a slice of tranquility off hectic Atwood Avenue.

For two decades, the garden center and its flowers have been part of Rhode Island's celebrations. Andrea Mancini, the ninth of their 11 children, ran the garden center.

She and her husband, Steve Mancini, a musician in the warmup band Fathead, died in the fire.

Her mother, Jacqueline Jacavone, is at the kitchen table, facing away from the TV. Earlier, she went out to do errands and wished she hadn't.

"I made a mistake. I went to the store, I shouldn't have gone," she says.

"How are you? Doing all right?" people asked her.

The bank was the same story.

On the dining room table is a gift basket from her mayor, and a letter from her senator. There are red roses on the TV. Three of her children and two grandchildren have arrived.

"That's all of them over there," Jacavone says of her children, in a family picture. "Andrea is the tallest one, in the back."

"It's coming up, Ma," one of her daughters says.

Jacavone leans on the back of the sofa and watches the TV, waiting for a particular few seconds of news footage from Feb. 20, 2003. It is part of a scene from the fire that has been replayed again and again in the last year.

The TV shows Maria Jacavone, Andrea's younger sister, sobbing in the parking lot of The Station nightclub, where she had rushed to look for Andrea and Steve.

It's quickly gone, and Jacqueline Jacavone sits back down at the kitchen table, and clicks off the TV news. "I don't want to watch this."

On the table are photos. "This was her," she says of a picture of Andrea in the greenhouse.

Another shows Andrea and Steve. "He was a good-looking kid," she says. "He had a ponytail. She used to pull it back for him."

"They were quite a pair."

Loss sinking in The blond woman in a stylish overcoat bends down to light a candle near Ty Longley's cross. She identifies herself as Heidi Longley.

She is the mother of the rock star's son, Acey Ty Christopher Longley. He was born in August, months after his father, the Great White guitarist, died in the Station fire. Acey is here with his mother from Chicago, where they live.

Just before 4 p.m., mother pushes her son's stroller through the snow and dirt covering the Station site. Acey is wrapped in a brightly colored blanket.

"He's not just the Great White guitarist," she says. "He's my soulmate, and someone's son and someone's Dad."

Diane Mattera, whose daughter Tammy died in the fire, in September removed Ty Longley's memorial from the site, saying it didn't belong there. It was the rock band's pyrotechnics that started the fire that night.

"I came here to look out for him," says Heidi Longley. "I want to let people know that Ty, too, is a victim."

It's her second trip to Rhode Island this year. She came here with Ty Longley's father in the days after the fire. One year later, walking through the muddy lot, the loss was sinking in -- finally.

"Ty is not touring in Japan or Germany. No, Heidi, Ty is not coming home," she says.

At Thursday's memorial ceremony at Rhodes on the Pawtuxet, she met Michelle Hoell, Tammy's sister.

Hoell says Longley approached her as she was leaving the function hall.

"She asked that if we got mad, that we take it out on her, not on Ty or her baby. She said that she was very sorry for our loss. Being a mother she could understand my mom, but she said she didn't want her stuff touched again."

"She said, that he was the guy she loved and it was hard having a baby without him."

The two women talked for half an hour and then hugged. "Now I do believe there are 100 victims and not 99," says Hoell.

Putting it behind It is 7:15 p.m., and the lot where the nightclub once stood is lit like a football stadium. Bare, skinny trees stretch to the sky.

Orange plastic fencing surrounds the property. As they arrive, people pick up long-stemmed red roses, donated for the ceremony. Helium balloons in soft yellow, pink and blue, are tied to the crosses. Some crosses have their own Mylar balloons, with messages -- Thank You, or a Superbowl championship balloon.

Nancy Noyes gives interviews under a tent that is set up for the media throng. A sidestreet is lined with cameras on tripods pointed toward the crosses.

Noyes has come from New London, Conn., and is trying to meet up with her hometown television station. She says talking about the fire and her ordeal helps. "Talking to you guys helps keep my mind off it."

She was in the hospital for more than two months, in a coma for three weeks. She had burns over her head and back. Her thick, wavy black hair has grown back. But she has a scar that runs across the bridge of her nose and under her left eye, and another scar on her chin. Her hands are still wrapped in bandages. She had her own housekeeping business, but hasn't been able to work since the fire.

"I need to start putting it behind me," she says, "I still think about it every day. I don't think I need to remember anymore. I'll remember it through my hands every day."

She doesn't know how she escaped the fire. She hopes the police officer or firefighter who rescued her will find her here tonight.

One man is sitting on a steel chair about two feet in front of a cross with the name, Derek Brian Johnson. He has white hair and wears a baseball cap and khakis. Flowers are attached to the cross. A woman pauses, and puts her hand on his shoulder: "My thoughts are with you."

She moves on, he stares at the cross.

People are arriving in small groups; eventually the crowd swells to about 1,500. They wear jeans, corduroys, winter coats. They talk softly, laughing sometimes. The RIPTA shuttle buses -- with destination signs reading "special" -- drop off people who parked about a mile away.

Patricia Belanger is here to celebrate her daughter's birthday. Her daughter Dina DeMaio, who worked part-time at The Station, would have been 31 today.

Belanger has brought a birthday cake. Several young cousins wear birthday hats.

"It's a sad day, but a happy day, too," Belanger says. "We never got to sing happy birthday to her, because she missed her party. She had to work that night."

Back in the club Linda Fisher and Julie Mellini walk into J.R.'s Bourbon Street Rock House at about 8:30 p.m.

"Do you want a beer?," asks Mellini.

"Yes, dear," says Fisher.

The two women are friends, who escaped the Station fire. Tonight they want to do what they didn't get to do that night: drink a few beers and listen to loud rock music.

A Metallica tribute band warms up at the neon-lit club, part of the Mardi Gras complex in Cranston. It's one of the places these friends go since they lost their beloved hangout, The Station.

Mellini, 35, and Fisher, 34, are not going near the site tonight. They don't want to mourn there. "Everybody is so upset. They are caught. They can't move on," says Fisher.

Fisher was burned on her hands and face. Mellini was a bartender that night. Debra Wagner, 32, was burned too.

She joins Fisher in a quiet section of J.R.'s. For months, Wagner was afraid of nightclubs and would stand in a corner away from the crowd. But that has changed. "Yesterday was the 365th day," says Wagner. "Today I start all over."

Someone at J.R.'s gives Mellini a beaded necklace with a blinking pendant, advertising Bacardi rum. On her shirt, she wears a golden pin with a cross, an angel and the number 100.

Fisher treated herself today and bought a new wedding ring. Her original ring doesn't fit on her finger that was burned.

"Life can still be good, even with the scars," says Fisher. "After a few minutes, people don't even see them."

Fisher dreams of opening her own club one day. "I'm going to bring back all of those '80s bands."

It's about 9 p.m. Cigarette smoke fills the room, the bartender pours drinks, and the band takes the stage, their guitars squealing.

Sacred place Much of the memorial ceremony draws on the spirit of this place, the site of a fire that killed 100 people.

"We come to honor their memory and to feel their presence again," says Father Marciano, the priest who started the day with a memorial Mass at 7 a.m.

"We stand here on this sacred place to hear them whisper to us that they are home safe."

A tight crowd is in a semicircle around the podium. The crosses are behind them.

The Rev. Bruce Greer, a Warwick fire chaplain, says, "May this sacred place remind us always of the incredible human capacity to help and be helped in times of need."

At around 10:40 p.m., they begin reading the names.

The names are spoken by representatives of all the people who came to help one year ago: the police, the firefighters, the clergy, the hospitals and others.

They read slowly, for 20 minutes. The silence is unbreaking.

People have their arms over each other's shoulders. Some are crying, but quietly, with respect.

As soon as the last name is read, everyone, it seems, lets out a breath of air. And they begin 100 seconds of silence in honor of the dead. The bright lights dim; darkness falls on the crowd.