Digital Extra: The Station Fire

No one can say for sure whether the death of Station fire survivor Jennifer L. Stowers was suicide or an accident.

09:42 AM EST on Thursday, December 9, 2004

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

Jennifer L. Stowers and Doug Quintal were to have been married last year.

The official death toll of The Station nightclub fire stands at 100, a number conveying a sense of totality, as if the ruin of lives had been absolute.

But Doug Quintal says the number is wrong. His fiancée was the 101st victim.

Jennifer L. Stowers escaped the Feb. 20, 2003, fire in West Warwick with a cracked rib and a black eye; a friend pulled her through the front doors as falling bodies clogged the entrance.

She died three months later from an overdose of the antidepressant Zoloft, an autopsy found, prescribed for her emotional wounds.

The Massachusetts Chief Medical Examiner's Office could not, however, determine whether the overdose resulted from Stowers' inability to properly metabolize the drug or whether it had been deliberate.

"All we know is that the drug killed her," says Quintal. "And she wouldn't have been on the drug had the fire not occurred."

Blond and blue-eyed, a third-grade Boston teacher by day and a lover of music on Friday nights, Stowers died May 21, 2003, five days after her 23rd birthday and six weeks before her wedding to Quintal.

On Sunday, several Boston bands, including Quintal's, The Syphlloids, are hosting a benefit concert in Stowers' memory at Middle East Nightclub in Cambridge. Proceeds will support a foundation established in her name for the Blackstone Elementary School, in South Boston, where she taught.

The fundraiser is giving Quintal the chance to talk publicly for the first time about Stowers' death, offering a reminder of the fire's enduring hurt, while highlighting use of a controversial drug blamed for causing worsening depression and suicides in several cases around the country.

THE DAY Jennifer Stowers died, she had gone grocery shopping, Quintal knows now. He has checked the time stamped on the store receipt: 3:30 p.m.

She made dinner for herself in their Boston apartment; Quintal would be working late at Emerson College, where he teaches marketing and communications.

She poured herself a glass of wine and settled in on the living room couch with a pile of student papers to grade.

Jennifer Stowers had grown up in Derry, N.H., the only child of Joseph and Ellen Stowers. She loved to travel, touring Europe with her mother in 1997 and crossing the country with four friends in 1998, the year she graduated from Pinkerton Academy in Derry.

The following year she enrolled at Wheelock College in Boston and soon became a regular at area coffeehouses and the more rowdy nightspots where Quintal and The Syphlloids played their brand of punk revival.

"I had a crush on her the first time I met her," Quintal says.

Each night when Stowers showed up -- all smiles and swaying hair, a small tattoo on her right shoulder spelling out "freedom and compassion" in Chinese characters -- Quintal, the group's lead vocalist, would dedicate the same song to her: "Guys Like Me Never Get Girls Like You."

The ritual went on for almost two years until Valentine's Day night in 2002 when Quintal asked: Why don't you go out with me?

"Because you never ask!" Stowers replied. "I've waited two years for you to come around and ask me out."

Quintal proposed three months later, on Stowers' 22nd birthday, May 16.

"We moved in together shortly thereafter," Quintal says. "Both of us knew this was meant to be."

They spent all their free time together. But on the night that Great White would play The Station, Feb. 20, 2003, Quintal had to work late.

Stowers went with four friends. She was returning with draft beers from the bar with one of them when they saw the group's pyrotechnics ignite. They rushed toward the stage, thinking they were missing the show. Someone spilled a beer on Stowers, slowing their progress.

That was why they were so close to the door when the fire crept up the stage walls. Two of Stowers' friends never got out, including the one who had used Quintal's ticket.

THE FIRE, says Quintal, "changed her."

Haunted by what she had seen and heard, Stowers descended into depression.

"Every time it seemed she was making progress forward, she would attend an event to pay tribute to somebody who died in the fire and it just set her back," Quintal says.

Stowers joined a group of survivors who met regularly to share their feelings, struggling with a base of knowledge that others like Quintal couldn't know.

"Basically that was their form of therapy," he says. "I felt really helpless. There was absolutely nothing I could do. I had no idea what she had experienced."

Stowers sought professional help and was prescribed Zoloft.

Zoloft is a member of the family of antidepressants called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, designed to regulate the absorption of serotonin, a chemical in the body believed to control moods.

According to the Physicians Desk Reference, serotonin is usually quickly reabsorbed after its release at the junctures between nerves. Re-uptake inhibitors such as Zoloft slow this process, thereby boosting the levels of serotonin available in the brain.

In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an advisory asking manufacturers of antidepressants to include a warning label recommending close observation of adults and children using SSRI drugs for worsening depression and suicidal tendencies.

Then in October, the FDA issued yet another advisory linking the antidepressant to suicidal tendencies in adolescents.

Stowers had been taking Zoloft for about 11 weeks, Quintal says, during which her doctor increased her dosage. Eventually her mood improved and her spirits rebounded.

She returned to teaching and focused again on her upcoming wedding. Both endeavors required her concentration and proved therapeutic.

"She knew she was doing something positive and something constructive," he says. "It allowed her to take her mind off [the fire] for a while.

"Towards the end of her life, probably the last four weeks, she was kind of back to herself," Quintal says. "She was really getting excited about the wedding. She had been tenured after her first year of teaching, which is virtually unheard of, and she was very excited about that."

When the next school year started, she would move up to teach fourth grade, which meant she'd have many of the third graders she had grown close to.

"It seemed," Quintal says, "like things were progressing the way things should have been."

THEN QUINTAL says he came home to their Boston apartment that day and found Stowers slumped on a living room couch amid her students' scattered papers and a broken wine glass.

Quintal says he and Stowers' family believe Jennifer died because she was improperly metabolizing the drug; the number of remaining Zoloft tablets indicated she had stuck to her prescription.

But suicide can't be ruled out.

"That's the hardest thing about it," says Quintal, "not knowing for sure how she died."

Her parents, Quintal says, are considering filing a lawsuit against Pfizer Inc., the maker of Zoloft.

"It's a disclaimer issue," Quintal says. "The drug is responsible for her death. There is absolutely no warning that death is a side effect."

In response, Pfizer spokesman Bryant Haskins says, "There has been no determination made that this was even a suicide. Zoloft has been around for years and has offered safe and effective treatment to millions of people who have suffered from major depression."

Jennifer Stowers was buried in her wedding dress.