A photo shows aerial views of the burned-out remains of The Station nightclub, in West Warwick, where 100 people died in a late- night fire on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2003. More than 440 people were in the club. Fire apparatus and other emergency vehicles can be seen, along with construction equipment that was used to remove debris.

The Providence Journal / JOHN FREIDAH

In the days after the Station nightclub fire, the town fire marshal who had inspected the building told investigators that he could not remember what the legal capacity of the building was. But, before a grand jury, he would recall a detailed conversation in which, he says, one of the nightclub’s owners asked for an increased capacity.

West Warwick Fire Marshal Denis P. Larocque told a state police detective and a deputy state fire marshal that he could not recall the capacity without checking his notes, which were in a file that he told them was missing.

When Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch on Wednesday disclosed 3,000 pages of evidence gathered in the investigation of the 2003 Station fire, it began to shed light on some of the most abiding questions about what led to the tragedy in West Warwick.

For the first time, the public read an explanation offered by Larocque as to why he missed deadly polyurethane foam that had been applied to the club’s walls in violation of the state fire code. He said he was so incensed to see that the club had reinstalled an illegal door that he didn’t notice the foam.

But a key question about the nightclub’s capacity remains unanswered:

Why did Larocque set it at 317 in December 1999, only to increase it to 404 three months later?

A Providence Journal computer analysis in 2003, aided by review of a Channel 12 (WPRI) videotape of the fire, shows that, if the lower capacity had been enforced, virtually everyone in the building would have had time to escape. As it was, more than 440 people were inside, and 100 died.

Larocque could not be reached for comment last week.

According to a court filing, Larocque told the grand jury investigating the fire that he had boosted the club’s capacity to 404 at the request of co-owner Michael A. Derderian, who had asked him during a meeting at the nightclub whether the club could fit 400 people.

Although Larocque’s memory of that meeting was clear, he told state investigators five days after the fire that he did not recall the nightclub’s capacity, that he needed to consult his notes, which were in the file that he said was missing.

Lynch began releasing evidence in the case last week in response to a public records request filed by The Journal days after the nightclub’s co-owners pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter charges. On Sept. 29, Michael A. Derderian, 45, was sentenced to serve four years in minimum-security prison on work release. His brother, Jeffrey A. Derderian, 40, was ordered to perform 500 hours of community service. Earlier in the year, Daniel M. Biechele, 30, the rock band tour manager who triggered fireworks that started the fire, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in minimum-security prison on work release.

A hand-drawn plan of The Station, with measurements that West Warwick Fire Marshal Denis P. Larocque used in calculating the capacity of the nightclub. The Town of West Warwick supplied this copy in response to a public records request from The Providence Journal in 2003.

Lynch also had promised relatives of the 100 people who died that he would make the evidence public.

The 3,000 pages released Wednesday are a small fraction of what ultimately is expected to be made public.

The building that would become The Station nightclub opened for the first time in 1946 under the ownership of two brothers, who had dubbed it Casey’s Inn.

It would be the first of many openings. In the next 57 years, the building went through 14 incarnations, all somewhere along the restaurant-bar-nightclub spectrum.

Although the wood-frame building at the corner of Cowesett Avenue and Kulas Road never underwent significant expansion, the number of people allowed inside the building — the occupancy limit set by the West Warwick Fire Department — multiplied by eight.

The earliest documented capacity of the building was set in 1969. “The Building should not be occupied by more than Fifty people,” Fire Inspector James Hudson wrote to the owner of the building, then called the Red Fox Inn.

By 1991, that number had grown to 225, as Glenn’s Pub was giving way to Crackerjacks. Fire Capt. Robert E. Kelley inspected the building for use as a restaurant and set the capacity at 225.

By the late 1990s, Howard J. Julian ran the place as The Filling Station, a restaurant and nightclub. And the Police Department was taking notice.

On the afternoon of Dec. 16, 1999, Police Chief Peter T. Brousseau called Julian into his office at police headquarters.

“Mr. Julian was advised that his business has become a problem for the Police Department,” Brousseau recorded in a memo to himself, which The Journal received from the town in response to a public records request in 2003.

The police had received complaints about noise, parking, fights and auto accidents, Brousseau said — and about overcrowding.

“I strongly advised Mr. Julian that he needs to get his business under control or he faces a hearing in front of the Town Council,” Brousseau wrote to Town Manager Wolfgang Bauer the next day. Brousseau closed his memo by noting that the Fire Department was in the process of determining the capacity of the nightclub.

Fire Marshal Denis P. Larocque would get his first crack at calculating how many people could safely be inside the building.

In late 1999, Larocque talked to Raymond J. Villanova, whom state prosecutors have described as the principal in Triton Realty, the company that owned the nightclub building and still owns the land. Villanova gave Larocque permission to enter the building. Larocque made detailed measurements, sketching a floor plan that covers a sheet of lined notebook paper, with arrows and numbers recording the dimensions of various spaces inside the building.

He divided the nightclub into seven principal areas: Main Lounge No. 1, Main Lounge No. 2, Center Lounge, Left Rear Lounge, Front Bar, Dance Floor and Pool Room.

Larocque applied two formulas in calculating the capacity: one for rooms with tables and chairs and one for rooms without furniture.

Under the state fire code, a room with furniture had to have 15 square feet of floor space for each person. To calculate the capacity, the square footage of the room is divided by 15. For rooms without furniture, the figure is 7 square feet per person.

Some of the rooms in The Station would always have furniture in Larocque’s calculations, such as the Front Bar. Some, such as the dance floor, would never have furniture.

But three areas, the two Main Lounges and the Left Rear Lounge, could go either way. Under normal conditions, they would have tables and chairs. For big concerts, the furniture would be removed.

So Larocque made two calculations of the nightclub’s capacity, one for normal conditions, another for big concerts.

On Dec. 30, 1999, Larocque reported his calculations in a memo to Police Chief Brousseau. Under normal conditions, the building could hold 253 people, Larocque wrote. “This business is allowed to increase this number to 317 by removing tables and chairs from 3 lounge areas and providing only standing room in those areas.”

The term “standing room” would become critically important.

The setting of the capacity didn’t solve Howard Julian’s problems.

“Another issue that is of grave concern to me is an ongoing problem of overcrowding which occurs at this establishment. Occupancy limits are determined and are exceeded on busy nights,” Fire Chief Richard J. Rita wrote in a Feb. 18, 2000, letter to the Town Council. “This becomes a problem should evacuation or emergency medical treatment become necessary.”

By February, though, Julian had found a buyer for his embattled nightclub. The new — and final owners — of The Station would be a pair of brothers, just like the men who opened the place in 1946.

Jeffrey A. Derderian, then 33, a television news reporter, and Michael A. Derderian, then 38, an entrepreneur, had applied to the Town of West Warwick to take over Julian’s liquor license and his business.

In a Feb. 17, 2000, memo to the town clerk, Brousseau urged caution. “The Police Department has a number of issues that need to be addressed with the new owner of the business.” He listed the familiar complaints about The Station, including overcrowding. “Before I can recommend the transfer of any of the licenses for that business, I think the new owner has to be made aware of these issues and take the corrective actions needed to resolve them.”

Two weeks later, Brousseau got his chance to let the Derderians know about his concerns.

Town officials, including Larocque, met with Howard Julian and Michael and Jeffrey Derderian at 10 a.m. at The Station.

During that meeting, Michael Derderian told Larocque that “he was aware of what the occupancy of the building was from the previous owner,” according to a court filing that summarizes Larocque’s testimony to the Station fire grand jury. Michael Derderian asked “if the building could hold 400 people.”

Larocque went back to work.

He didn’t take new measurements of the nightclub, but worked off the sketch he had made in December.

The first calculations in his notebook show he tried recalculating the capacity using the same method as in December, but this time, the Derderians also agreed to remove furniture from the Front Bar for big concerts. That added 41 people to the total.

Removing a cigarette machine and a video game added floor space for two more people.

And, by rounding numbers off differently, he was able to add two more.

As an example, Main Lounge No. 1 has enough floor space for 45.9 people. In the first calculation, Larocque rounded that off to 45. The second time, he kept the .9. Added with .4 each in three other rooms, plus .2 each in two other rooms, this approach yielded another 2.5 people for the entire building.

The end result was 359 people, not the 400 that Larocque said Michael Derderian had requested.

Larocque tried another approach.

The fire code required 15 square feet per person for rooms with furniture and 7 square feet per person for rooms without, which Larocque had called “standing room” in December.

But the fire code had a different definition of “standing room.” Also called “waiting space,” it was generally used for areas where patrons were near an exit and would only remain for a short period, such as while waiting for a table in the foyer of a restaurant.

The code required only 5 square feet per person, which would allow more people to fit in the same space. Larocque considered all seven principal areas of The Station to be waiting space.

He took the entire square footage of those areas, subtracted space that the code required to be left open for aisles and divided by five.

The result: The Station could hold 404 people.

Though the documents explain how Larocque calculated the new number, they do not explain why he thought it appropriate to consider nearly the entire nightclub as waiting space.

That same day of the calculation, March 2, 2000, Larocque recorded the change in a memo to Brousseau, according to the prosecutors’ summary of Larocque’s grand jury testimony. The actual memo has vanished, both Larocque’s file copy and the copy he said he sent to Brousseau. Larocque told investigators that, after the fire, he discovered an incomplete draft on his computer, which he printed out and handed over to them.

“Maximum capacity at any given time [when all tables and chairs are removed from all areas] ... will be 404, using the standing room allowance allowed by the Code,” the draft says.

Whether Larocque told Michael Derderian in writing is unclear.

Larocque told investigators that he filled out a duplicate form, one of which went to the owners and one of which went in the file. The file copy is missing.

But Larocque gave a different account to the grand jury, according to prosecutors. “It was definitely verbally he was informed of the number,” Larocque told the grand jury. When the Town Council approved the liquor license transfer from Julian to the Derderians on March 21, 2000, council members were presented with a memo labeled, “THE STATION.” It is unclear who wrote the memo.

The memo has three sections, dealing with parking, noise levels and capacity. The section on capacity begins: “We have spoke [sic] with Fire Chief Laroch [sic] and are crystal clear as to the amount of patrons we are allowed to have.”

The memo never states that number.

That Town Council meeting was tape recorded, a routine procedure. But a portion of the meeting during which the Derderians discussed their nightclub is missing from that recording.

According to a state police memo released last week, Town Clerk David Clayton told investigators the recording had no gap, but that it had not been turned on until some of the meeting was already over. “Mr. Clayton added that the recorder may not have activated or he may have forgotten to start it at the beginning of the meeting,” the state police memo says. Regardless of what number the Derderians had been given, prosecutors have said the nightclub owners never abided by the 404 limit calculated by Larocque.

In band contracts that were released as evidence last week, the nightclub boasted of capacities as high as 550, 600 and 750.

Prosecutors said that computerized ticket sales for The Station at Strawberries and tickets.com had no automatic cutoff, after which the computer would stop selling tickets.

The Station ran at least one ad in The Phoenix newspaper saying “only 500 tickets available.”

And a ticket order form seized from Michael Derderian’s Narragansett home indicates that Jeffrey Derderian ordered 700 tickets for the fateful concert, 350 to be sold in advance and 350 on the day of the show.

The main part of The Station open to the public, which contained all public areas except the restrooms, was about 78 feet by 48 feet — smaller than a regulation basketball court.

State investigators have determined that 458 people were inside the nightclub when it caught fire on Feb. 20, 2003, ultimately killing 100 of them.

Five days after the fire, a state police detective and a deputy state fire marshal questioned Larocque about his dealings with The Station.

“Was there some discussion with the present owners as to what their occupancy could be?” the investigators asked, according to a transcript of a taped interview that does not identify which investigator asked the question.

Instead of answering the question directly, Larocque described the process of determining a building’s capacity based on the floor area.

“Based on that did you … have a discussion or send correspondence to any of the owners indicating what the occupancy would be?” the investigators asked.

“Yes, based upon the fact, um, if all areas … had removed all tables and chairs, um, it was an occupancy number that was given, uh, to the present owners.”

“OK do you recall what those figures were?”

“What I’d have to do is review the file ... as far as what the numbers actually were.”

The file, of course was missing.

Larocque was interviewed by the investigators on Feb. 25. On April 3, he was still looking for the missing file, he told state investigators in a second interview.

He and a secretary were going through all of the fire marshal’s files, trying to locate the missing documents, Larocque told the investigators.

Capt. Russell G. McGillivray Jr., the town’s rescue coordinator, happened by.

“I recognized the type of file he was looking for, told him there was more boxes of those downstairs,” McGillivray told investigators in his own interview. “In the basement in the back room that we call the Archie room.” The room was an informal lounge, with a couple of couches and a television, where McGillivray stored records related to rescue services.

McGillivray told the investigators he found two — and only two — boxes of fire marshal records. They were labeled 1999 and 2000, the two years in which Larocque had set occupancy limits for The Station.

McGillivray said he brought the boxes to Larocque, who started looking through them, and found a file for 211 Cowesett Ave., the Station’s address.

“Were you surprised to see it there?” the investigators asked Larocque.

“Very much so.”

“And what did you do after you got the file?”

“The secretary was sitting at her desk. I just took the file out, dropped it on her desk and she looked at the address and, you know, same thing — surprise.”

Larocque said he then turned the file over to Town Manager Wolfgang Bauer, who was gathering town records related to the fire.

Although the file contained the sketches and calculations Larocque used to raise The Station’s occupancy limit to 404, it did not include the memo that he said he sent to the police chief telling him of that number.

And it did not include the duplicate of the form that Larocque said he used to inform the Derderians of the capacity of The Station.

With the omission in the tape recording of the Town Council meeting at which the Derderians discussed their nightclub, all of the town records that might show what occupancy limit was given to the Derderians no longer exist, if they ever did.