Digital Extra: The Station Fire

12:35 AM EST on Sunday, February 20, 2005

BY TOM MOONEY
Journal Staff Writer

Two years ago tonight, Rhode Island suffered an unsparing hurt.

The Station, an old West Warwick restaurant turned nightclub, burned and 100 people died. Daughters and sons. Lovers and friends. Uncles and nieces.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Brandon Fravala is still filled with anger over the Station fire. But he finds joy playing with his son, Nicholas, 6.

A total of 236 others were injured in one of the worst fires of its kind in U.S. history.

For many survivors and those who lost loved ones, the pain lingers, eased little by the passage of time. They struggle to move forward, battling physical challenges, emotional injury; some with insurance running out.

Others have used what happened that cold Thursday night to redefine their lives. They awake each day, they say, thankful for the life the fire spared.

What follows are snapshots of a few of the many victims of The Station fire, two years later.

Brandon Fravala, 26

"I'm not going to lie to anybody," says Brandon Fravala, a seasonal landscaper who spends these winter days with little to do. "I have a lot of anger built up."

"I'm angry at everybody. Since the fire, it changed me. I have a very, very short fuse. It's the whole situation, what I went through. It just makes me angry. I wasn't that way before and I don't like it. I want to get back into counseling."

Fravala, of Richmond, had gone to the club that night with a friend. Once the fire started, the push to escape separated them. Fravala went for the front door. He felt the heat on his back and bodies beneath his feet. He was halfway out the door when he tripped and joined the pile.

"I was that white blob you saw on the tape [a television cameraman happened to be in the club that night] holding on to that metal railing, because I was getting pulled back inside."

His injuries? "My back and my ankle. And I've been messed up in the head since then. I was told I was second to the last one pulled out by the door."

His friend made it out the kitchen door.

Fravala hasn't yet had his back injury diagnosed, he says. He was seeing a chiropractor in Providence for a while "but I couldn't afford the fuel up and back" from Richmond.

He says he has no medical insurance; some of his medical bills were paid by two funds established through donations to help fire victims. The rest were forwarded to his lawyer with the hope that someday the numerous civil suits filed in the case will help him settle his debts.

Fravala says he knows he needs counseling for his depression. The best help he received came from other survivors, he says, who for a time met regularly at the Cowesett Inn, across the street from The Station ruins.

"I was more comfortable talking to people who were there, who actually understood what I was saying. It was easier for me to talk to them than it would be to sit in front of somebody who I didn't know from a hole in the wall and spill my heart out to them."

Most of the light in his life now, Fravala says, comes from his 6-year-old son Nicholas.

He hopes counseling will help him heal, because "life could be a lot better."

Sharon Wilson, 44

Sharon Wilson had her latest surgery three weeks ago. Doctors fused three disks in her spine that were damaged by the crush of bodies that piled on top of her in the nightclub doorway.

Her medical insurance runs out next month when a monthly disability check for $581 will start arriving. She has qualified for Medicaid but the insurance won't kick in, she says, for two years.

"I don't know what I'm going to do until then," she says. "My psychiatrist has already told me she doesn't accept Medicaid."

Before the fire, Wilson worked about 60 hours a week, split between her job at a group home for disabled adults and her own cleaning business. But her injuries and posttraumatic stress prevent her from returning to work.

Other than her monthly disability payments, "I won't have any money coming in. I'm petrified."

Wilson lives in West Warwick with her boyfriend, Robert Cripe, a truck driver who pulled her from the pile at the door, pulled her out of her pants and her shoes and watched the space she had occupied instantly fill with another body. The pink scar on Wilson's left arm is a reminder of that night: the moment she touched the super-heated railing at the door.

Wilson says she doesn't qualify as a beneficiary on her boyfriend's health insurance. She tried.

"He moved in a month before the fire and you have to be a common-law couple for three or more years and also have to have all your accounts together."

She's tried to get onto her son's health insurance policy, too. He works at Foxwoods Resort Casino, "but I can't get on that either."

"I've always been a worker and that is the hardest thing. Here you are a workaholic and now, well, I didn't even walk for about three months. It took a toll on me. I spent most of 2004 recovering from a mini-breakdown I had in October 2003."

Wilson and Cripe attended the Great White show with their friend, Bonnie Hamelin. The three became separated in the club's foyer as the crowd stampeded for the door. Hamelin never made it out.

Survivor guilt virtually crippled Wilson for a time. "Now I'm trying to move on."

Her recent surgery has left her taking baby steps again -- unable to bend over, lift or twist for three more months until her back heals.

"Believe me, that isn't easy," she says. "I live with two men."

Shawn Corbett, 32

For more than 10 years, Shawn Corbett and his older brother, Eddie, worked side by side as skilled plasterers whose talents had taken them inside Newport mansions.

Then Eddie, 31, died in the fire and Shawn's life crumbled.

"My brother was also my business partner and without him I didn't really want to work . . . About a year after the fire, I did my first job and it was an emotional wreck for me. After the job was done, I didn't want to do it anymore. Every day I cried and cried just wanting to call out to him for something."

One month rolled into the next. Shawn couldn't lift a trowel. He drove to the site of the former nightclub and cleaned the grounds, once sweeping the old parking lot. He asked his wife, Emily, to leave him. He couldn't burden her anymore with his grief. She refused.

"She basically saved my life," he says. "She sat me down and told me that she loved me and she would be by my side no matter what happened and that I needed to start getting my mind together. She didn't want to lose me."

Friends also approached Shawn. It was time, they told him, to return to work, to pick up where he and Eddie left off and resume doing what they both loved.

Shawn listened. He eventually found another partner who works as hard as his brother did.

The last two years, Shawn says, have had "more downs than ups." He hopes the tide has turned.

A gravestone now marks Eddie's resting place. His brother, who lived in West Warwick, loved to surf at Narragansett Beach. A stonecutter plans to engrave his stone with a beach scene, etched with Eddie on a wave.

Richard Sanetti, 41

Richard Sanetti entered The Station that night as a commercial painter, unchallenged in his job, but content.

He emerged -- from the fire and then 16 months of therapy -- determined to walk with giant steps through the rest of his life and "leave a mark in this world."

"What happens when you go through something that traumatic is you come out of there assessing your life, and your priorities change. You come out saying to yourself: 'You almost died and you haven't done enough -- for humanity, for yourself, for your family or friends.' "

"I learned that day how fast it can all come to an end."

Sanetti, now 41, and his painting crew had met Great White singer Jack Russell at a Denny's restaurant the day before the concert. Russell told him to bring as many friends as he wanted to the show. Sanetti arrived with about 10 friends and relatives, including his 25-year-old niece, Bridget. She died in the fire.

"If you understood how much I loved my niece . . . She grew up in my household. My wife and I raised her. She was like a sister . . . and I swore to always protect her. And to have that happen in front of my eyes, 50 feet away, in front of my eyes, I can't begin to describe it to you. There is a piece of me that died. I will just never be the same."

After the fire and months of therapy, Sanetti started his own land development company, Eagle American Investors. And last fall he won a seat on the Coventry Town Council.

Politics, he says, "is where I can do the greatest amount of good. I'm supposed to do something in life, grand in scale and philanthropic in nature. I want to make an impact on the greater good. I want people to know I was here, that I was a civic person, that I contributed to my community. That I'm not someone who is forgotten. And the Town Council is a great vehicle for that. I represent 7,000 people. It's only the beginning. Prior to the fire, I only represented one."

Sanetti says he has come to terms with the fire and his loss.

"I'm moving on. I'm using it today to my advantage as a life lesson and a motivator. In my mind, I will be governor of the state of Rhode Island some day."

Ashley Poland, 23

Ashley Poland feels fortunate to be alive, but not lucky.

"If I was lucky, I wouldn't have been in the fire."

She had gone with her new boyfriend, Tommy Woodmansee III. When the fire started, he led her out by hand, waking her twice when she passed out from the smoke, pushing her out a window, where someone grabbed her. Tommy did not survive.

Poland suffered third-degree burns on her hands, less severe burns on her face, and torn cartilage in both knees, which have both been operated on.

"They are still painful," she says of her knees. "I can tell when it's going to rain."

Poland says, "you know who your true friends are when you go through something like this. You know by who stays around through it all. It was tough on some of my friends. They didn't know how to react around me so they just gave up."

Poland still has nightmares of the fire, still sees and hears people slapping at the club windows to escape.

"It definitely depends if I was thinking about it all day. I have a lot of things set if off, like hearing fire trucks and ambulances. As soon as I see them, I think about that night."

Or during fire drills at the Narragansett daycare center where she works. "When we have fire drills in school, the first thing I think about is getting everybody out. You would think I would want to be the first one out under those conditions, but I don't. I want them out. I've been through it. And I want everyone out."

Poland and her new boyfriend have been dating now for 20 months. They have never gone to a nightclub. They won't.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Kevin Beese with Sneakers, the family cat, was manager at the club. "It seems like a black cloud or something" has descended upon him since the fire, he says.

"I think it would just bring back too much. I have no need to go. It's like, why chance it? I know the chances are rare that it could happen again, but you know, it happened to me once, it could happen to me again."

Kevin Beese, 40

For years, The Station was the constant in Kevin Beese's nights.

During the day he worked construction, or guarded youth offenders at the Training School. But when the lights came on in the low, dark club, there was Beese, working security at the door, or bartendering. And for almost three years, until the fire, he managed the place, booking bands.

Since then, he says, "it seems like a black cloud or something" has descended over his attempts to find other work.

"I come onto something good and it phases right out."

He's tried construction again and tree trimming, "but it just seems like nothing is really working. The guys I'm working for are folding up work."

He worked for about six months at ReBar & Grill, in Warwick, he says, but it folded, too.

"It just hasn't been right since the fire," he says. "I haven't worked since Thanksgiving now."

"I lost a lot of people. There's not too many days that go by that I don't think of them. It's probably not good for me to dwell on it too much."

For the last two summers, Beese has organized concerts at the Stepping Stone Ranch in West Greenwich with proceeds going to the Station Family Fund. The first year brought in about $3,000. "Last year, I barely broke even."

He hopes this year's show will be bigger.

***

Digital Extra: Look back at the Station fire and its aftermath, view profiles of its victims, post remembrances in an online guest book, at:

http://www.projo.com/wwfire