Digital Extra: The Station Fire

01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, July 15, 2004

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

The Rhode Island medical examiner's response in the hours after The Station nightclub fire has left officials with an incomplete record of where many of the 96 bodies were found in the rubble.

While Dr. Elizabeth A. Laposata, the chief Rhode Island medical examiner, learned about the rising body count in the hours after what proved to be the nation's fourth-largest nightclub fire, she neither traveled to the scene herself nor assigned additional personnel to join the one investigator already there.

Ninety-six people were killed in the fire on Feb. 20, 2003, four more died in the following weeks, and about 230 others were injured. The fire started when the heavy-metal rock band Great White set off fireworks that ignited flammable foam used as soundproofing on the walls.

Normally, the medical examiner's office takes control of the bodies at a crime scene, such as The Station fire. Before a body is moved, the medical examiner's staff typically takes photographs and measurements, collects physical evidence, tags the body and records its precise location, according to Gerald J. Coyne, deputy attorney general.

The location of the bodies is important in determining the cause of death and prosecuting any crime. Three people -- club owners Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, and Great White manager Daniel Biechele -- are each charged with 200 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of the 100 nightclub patrons.

They are also named in a wave of civil suits brought by victims and their families.

Andrew Horwitz, a professor of criminal law at the Ralph R. Papitto School at Roger Williams University, said he doubts the prosecution will be derailed by the failure to document where bodies were found, but it "could complicate" the case.

For example, he said, to prove each count against Biechele, who's accused of lighting the fireworks, the state will "have to prove a causal chain between each death and setting off the pyrotechnics. If they don't know exactly where body 53 died, that could complicate things."

Also, he said, the lack of documentation of where each body was found could call into question the exact cause of a death: the flammable foam on the nightclub walls or an inability to find or get out of the exits.

Coyne yesterday confirmed that for a substantial number of bodies, there is no record from where in the club they were recovered.

Carl Zambarano, an investigator in the medical examiner's office, confirmed yesterday when contacted by The Providence Journal that most of the bodies had no tags or numbers when they were taken to the Providence morgue from the fire scene.

Typically, he said, an investigator on the scene would make a grid, and on the tag write where in the grid the body was found. Zambarano, who was at the state morgue in Providence, received the first 75 bodies: The first 20 had tags or numbers, the next 55 did not.

Zambarano said he did not see the other 21 bodies that arrived through the early morning hours and into the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 21.

After the fire, Governor Carcieri brought in Titan Corp., a San Diego-based defense and homeland security consultant, to study Rhode Island's response to The Station fire.

The year-long report, paid for by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and released Tuesday, criticized Chief Medical Examiner Laposata's response.

The report said that "despite early and repeated warnings that this was an event with significant fatalities, the OME [Office of the Medical Examiner] never marshaled the necessary investigative and transportation resources."

The lack of documentation and the poor response emerged yesterday in interviews with staff from the medical examiner's office and with police and fire officials who were at the fire scene.

Jay Kingston, the lone investigator on call at the medical examiner's office that night, went to the fire after hearing from West Warwick police around 11:30 p.m.

The Station was on fire, and first reports said 15 to 20 people might be dead, according to the Titan report.

Kingston, according to the report, called Laposata at home while turning on the TV news. He also called Ocean State Livery Transfer Service, which has a contract with the Office of the Medical Examiner to transfer bodies.

Kingston got to West Warwick at 1 a.m. with four people from the livery service, who were in two cars.

By then, the nightclub at 211 Cowesett Ave., was a crime scene, with crews working in the rubble by flashlights and beams from fire trucks.

It was clear to Maj. Paul A. Villa, a detective and 20-year veteran of the West Warwick Police Department, that Kingston was not prepared for what he found.

"The one investigator showed up with people from Ocean State Recovery. They had basically a hearse. The investigator had a pickup truck."

The Ocean State workers were in suits and overcoats, their standard uniforms to bring dignity to the job of taking bodies to the morgue. "They weren't dressed to go into a burned-out building," Villa said.

Kingston was inside the building, moving debris. As soon as he'd find a body, he would mark its location, and photograph it. The firefighters carried out the bodies, placing them on a tarp on a platform. Another tarp was hung for privacy.

"The investigator worked while he was there, but he was overwhelmed quickly once he got on the scene," Villa said. "He was basically by himself."

"I told him, you just don't have enough people."

In the after-action report by Titan, Laposata said she didn't remember getting phone calls from officials asking her, or any senior staff member, to come to the fire scene.

Yesterday, Albert A. Scappaticci, executive director of the state Emergency Management Agency, said he called Laposata at home at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.

"I told her she should have some representation there, a medical examiner, because of the number of fatalities," Scappaticci said. "And she said her person there was most capable, and that they were going to the office to prepare whatever they needed to prepare there."

West Warwick Police Chief Peter T. Brousseau said yesterday that Scappaticci asked him: "What do you need? What are your areas of concern?"

"I've got some concern about the number of bodies we've got here," Brousseau said he told Scappaticci.

Scappaticci called Laposata and handed Brousseau the cell phone at about 3:30 a.m.

Brousseau said he asked Laposata: "Are you aware of what's going on here? Are you sure you understand the magnitude of this?"

"It's tough when you get calls at that time of the morning. It takes you a couple minutes to wake up and understand what's going on," Brousseau said. "That's why I kept saying it.

"I don't think I requested her to come down there. I wanted her to understand the magnitude of the incident and make sure she was prepared to handle it. I thought once she knew that we had a large number of fatalities, she would come down or send some help.

"She assured me that she was already having her people coming in. At that point, I assumed that once she understood the magnitude of the problem she would get the people to respond. I didn't realize she had no intention of responding to the scene."

Dr. Patricia A. Nolan, state health director, speaking for Laposata on Tuesday, said the chief medical examiner didn't go to the scene because she wanted to prepare her office for the dead that would be arriving.

Laposata was appointed to the position of Rhode Island's chief medical examiner in January 1994 by Dr. Barbara A. DeBuono, the former state health director.

When Laposata was hired it was said she would be going to crime scenes and working with police. But she perplexed some police officers a few months later when she announced that medical examiners would no longer routinely visit murder scenes.

Her new policy was to send investigators to collect evidence, take photographs and answer questions for the police -- unless the police specifically asked for a medical examiner.

Police officers at the time said they relied on medical examiners to study the position of bodies, and valued their initial impressions at the scene.

Nolan didn't know why Laposata had not sent more people to the scene. Laposata has a 19-person staff, according to the Titan report. She was down a deputy medical examiner on the night of the fire, the report said.

She also has a list of transport companies that she can call for help in removing bodies from a scene, Grant C. Peterson, vice president of Titan, which wrote the after-action report, said in a telephone interview yesterday from the state of Washington.

As he worked at the scene, Kingston's camera broke and his flimsy plastic gloves didn't protect his hands from the winter cold; the Titan report said that the zippers on the body bags were freezing.

Kingston left at about 2 a.m. to take bodies back to the morgue, according to the report.

Kingston did not return a call requesting comment Tuesday. The medical examiner's office on Tuesday referred all calls to the Health Department.

Major Villa, of the West Warwick police, said of inspector Kingston: "All I know is that at one point, he just left. He just apparently left the scene and it became apparent we had to take over."

The Titan report said Kingston left the scene at 2 a.m. and returned at 3 a.m. "Mr. Kingston's temporary absence interrupted the OME recovery process on site," the report said.

Villa was inside the building, with four detectives who became responsible for photographing the bodies, and placing them in bags.

"I know we were operating off some sketches. I think they picked up where the [medical examiner's office] left off . . . basically most of what we were doing was hand-digging, using heavy machinery to take pieces of the building off, hand-digging to get to bodies where they were."

He said each body was handled with care, and logged as being found; he is not sure who was doing the mapping, but he believes an attempt was made to record the locations of the bodies.

"We did what we had to do, frankly; my people did a fantastic job with what they had to do," Villa said. But, he said, it was confusing.

The officers were confronted with body parts and groups of bodies. He said medical examiners have "the scientific knowledge of a body's anatomy. They can look and say that's this or that's that. It's hard for people who don't have the know-how."

"The problem is when one person comes in as he did, and initially starts doing their thing, they leave and you don't know how they were doing their thing, don't know where they left off.

"We didn't have anyone there that we could ask, 'How are you doing this? How do you want this done?' "

Richard James, coordinator of special investigations for the Rhode Island Fire Marshal's Office, said yesterday his crew was on the scene photographing bodies. He said pictures were taken of every body prior to being removed, but that he knows of no record of specifically where each body was found.

Cranston Fire Chief Robert J. Warren said firefighters and officers set up a system. Teams of four lined up in the parking lot. Each team was given a body bag, he said, and instructed to go in and remove one body and place it in a staging area "where the medical examiner would want it placed."

Officers interviewed yesterday said the medical examiner did not send enough hearses. Bodies were transported in public works and school department vans.

"There were not enough people to work with from the ME's office," Warren said. "They didn't have enough staff on site; the firefighters ended up doing a lot of the work that was probably not in our domain."

At the morgue in Providence, investigator Zambarano was taking care of the bodies that were coming in. An investigator for 11 years, he had been called in at 2 a.m. by Laposata.

"The first 20 had tags," he said. "After that they did not . . . no nothing."

Wayne Aldrich, a retired investigator with the Office of the Medical Examiner, came in the next morning at 9:30 to help with the bodies, he said. He said some bodies did have numbers, but quite a few did not. He said he was doing tags and numbering at the morgue, which is normally done at the scene so that someone can later "pinpoint" where the bodies were.

Robert J. Marshall Jr., spokesman for the Health Department, yesterday said Laposata would not comment on the issue of documentation of the bodies -- or having one investigator at the fire.

Coyne, the deputy state attorney general, said a lot of the work that would normally be performed before a body is moved from a death scene could not be done the night of the fire.

"There's a book response of what you'd like in a perfect world, but that night was anything but a perfect world," Coyne said. "There was a lot of rules that had to get put aside that night."

Coyne said the lack of documentation did not affect the criminal investigation. "From our point of view as prosecutors, we are satisfied that they each died as a result of the fire."

He said he has heard that the lack of documentation is proving a problem for civil lawyers, who may need to prove where a person died within the building to determine what products there may be implicated.

With staff reports from Tracy Breton, Michael Corkery, Edward Fitzpatrick and Paul Edward Parker.