PROVIDENCE — On Christmas Eve, Kendall Marshall, a football coach and father of two young children, had dinner with his family at home on Federal Hill. After some presents were opened, he went to a nightclub with eight or nine relatives to dance, drink and listen to hip-hop.

Hours later he was dead at Rhode Island Hospital, having been shot inside the club, Pulse, along with two other men that he did not know.

The slaying occurred even as a contingent of city police and state troopers waited outside the club, looking to head off trouble.

And now Marshall’s large extended family is tearfully trying to pull together, mourning someone who his mother, Norine Vaughn, described as a caring person who was “very, very good with children.”

“Everyone loved Kendall. He was a very outgoing person,” Vaughn said yesterday.

Marshall, 29, of 5 Luongo Square, was a Hope High School graduate who had attended the Community College of Rhode Island and had worked as a barber and in automotive jobs since high school but was unemployed at the time of his death. He coached the Mount Hope Cowboys youth football team and he lived with his mother; the mother of his two children, Annette Alves, 26; and their children, Dante, 6, and Anetra, 1.

Early Christmas morning an unidentified gunman, who had snuck a handgun past what Marshall’s relatives called spotty security at Pulse, fired at least three shots inside. As panicked clubgoers streamed through the exits — the police said a capacity crowd of at least 450 had been enjoying the loud music — police officers ran in and found three victims. The gunman escaped in the confusion.

“It was absolute chaos and bedlam,” Patrolman Peter Rocchio, who was outside the club at 86 Crary St., South Providence, told the city Board of Licenses at an emergency hearing at City Hall yesterday.

At the urging of the police, and pending a follow-up hearing tomorrow, the board voted unanimously to suspend Pulse’s licenses to operate and serve alcohol and to order the club to cease and desist from doing business.

Marshall, who fell near a pool table and the dance floor, was pronounced dead at Rhode Island Hospital. The lead police investigator, Capt. Hugh T. Clements Jr., detective commander, declined to say in what part of his body Marshall was struck.

The police identified the other victims as James Rue, 31, of the Mattapan section of Boston, who was wounded in the back, and Darius Armardor, 26, of Groton, Conn., who was wounded in the neck. Rue was admitted to Rhode Island Hospital — his medical status could not be determined yesterday — and Armardor was treated at the same hospital.

A couple of Marshall’s 10 brothers said neither they nor Marshall knew Rue or Armardor and they speculated that Marshall was not the intended target and was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. Clements said investigators do not know what provoked the violence.

“The police are clueless,” said one brother, Kyle Marshall, 28, shaking his head in disappointment and disgust.

Sitting at the kitchen table in the family’s cramped second-floor apartment, Norine Vaughn said, “I want to know who killed my child. I don’t care if it takes a hundred years to find out.”

Because there has been trouble at Pulse on busy Sunday nights before holidays, including violence, according to police Maj. Paul Fitzgerald, extra officers were on duty as a precaution. Club owner Alex Tomasso was required to have, and did have, a detail of four off-duty officers posted outside. In addition, the police assigned seven on-duty officers, according to Fitzgerald, including two or three state troopers.

Police Chief Dean M. Esserman was on hand, too, but left at about 12:30 a.m. The slaying occurred at about 1:30 a.m., a half hour before the club’s scheduled closing.

Having decided that it is too difficult to police clubs inside and outside, the Police Department followed its procedure and posted all the officers outside. When trouble erupts at a nightclub or bar, according to Fitzgerald, it usually occurs outside at closing time.

“We stay outside unless we have some specific information that something is going to occur inside,” Fitzgerald said. In taking an extra precaution, he said, the police were relying on the history of Pulse and were not acting on knowledge of a specific threat.

“We were afraid that violence was going to occur,” he told the board. “Despite those 11 officers, we were not able to prevent the violence.”

In a search for weapons, Pulse doormen frisk patrons and check inside their bags but they do not use the metal-detecting wands used by other clubs, according to the police. Dawn Marshall, Kendall Marshall’s sister-in-law, and a couple of his brothers complained that the security was inconsistent. Some patrons were allowed through without being checked while others were forced to stand spread-eagle and subjected to a heavy pat down, they charged.

“The club should be closed down. It had too many incidents happen,” Vaughn said. “I’m surprised they haven’t closed it down before this.”

“Someone was not doing their job” Sunday night. “[The gun] slipped through the cracks.”

The license board’s temporary shutdown of Pulse apparently has no immediate impact on the club, which is not scheduled to reopen until tomorrow night. Because Tomasso had not been given notice of yesterday’s hearing, it was a brief, one-sided affair with testimony from Fitzgerald and Rocchio.

By law the board can close an alcohol-serving licensee without notice in an emergency, provided that the licensee is given an opportunity to defend himself within 72 hours. Board Chairman Andrew J. Annaldo said the board would hold a show-cause hearing at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

Fitzgerald contended at yesterday’s hearing that the club is an imminent threat to public safety. New Year’s Eve is a Sunday before a holiday, too, and if Pulse is allowed to open, he said, he will be forced to strip protection from Providence’s residential neighborhoods and surround the club with 30 officers.

Tomasso could not be reached for comment last night.

A funeral for Kendall Marshall is scheduled for 11 a.m. tomorrow at Holy Cross Church of God in Christ, 1014 Broad St., with interment at North Burial Ground.

Besides his mother, children, and the mother of his children, Marshall is survived by his father, Augustus Castle; 10 brothers, 6 sisters, his paternal and maternal grandmothers and an aunt.