Mario Giamei, of Sutton, Mass., a bouncer at The Station, comforts Wendy Drown the day after the fatal fire.

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL / MARY MURPHY

Did someone block patrons from escaping through the stage door as The Station burned?

In the nearly four years since the nightclub fire, some survivors have said so, accusing an unnamed bouncer of turning them away.

Mario Giamei, one of the bouncers at the club that night, denied the charge under oath before a grand jury.

“No. No. Nobody, nobody was near that doorway trying to block anybody,” he said.

He offered an explanation of what people may have thought they saw in the frantic minutes as the fire raged: the band manager for Great White inadvertently blocking the doorway as he waited to escort out the one musician who would not make it out — and Giamei pushing him out of the way.

Another bouncer who was working that night, Scott J. Vieira — and whose wife died in the fire — was also asked indirectly by prosecutors whether he blocked the stage door.

Vieira said no. In fact, he testified he went back into the club through that door and directed at least a dozen people out; people who would have died, Vieira said, “unless I went back in.”

Giamei, 33, of Sutton, Mass., was a regular who had worked part-time at the club since 1994, filling in wherever needed, but usually hired for crowd control. He was not working the night of the fire but went to the show anyway.

He, like most club employees, was quite familiar with the doorway by the stage that he monitored, the doors that town inspectors had repeatedly cited as fire-code violations for the way they operated — but never for the flammable foam covering the interior door.

Giamei said as the fire quickly spread along the walls and the ceiling, he initially moved toward the front door of the club where he knew there was a fire extinguisher. Then he felt the heat of the fire on his back and saw the jam of people.

“…I just saw everything going up over me and around me in flames and I panicked for a second. I thought I was going to die at that point.”

Then he had a moment of clarity.

“I thought to myself, ‘Don’t, don’t — don’t go that way [toward the front], you may not make it out.’ I ran back toward that [stage] door, and the band was coming off the stage and running out and they were the only ones there with the guy, [band manager] Dan [Biechele].”

Giamei said Biechele was in the doorway “funneling” out the band. “He was looking for Ty Longley,” the band’s lead guitarist who would not make it out of the fire.

“He was looking at the stage. I said, ‘You’ve got to get out of this doorway’ and I pushed him through it,” said Giamei.

A prosecutor asked: “But you’re not implying that he was trying to block people from exiting that door?”

“No. No,” said Giamei. “Nobody, nobody was near that doorway trying to block anybody.”

Vieira, of West Warwick, worked part-time at the club as a bouncer, usually accepting beer or free admission in payment for helping control the crowds. He testified he was at the door the night of the fire, along with his wife, Kelly.

In their questioning of Vieira before the grand jury, prosecutors gingerly raised the question of whether at any time during the night he might have blocked people from the door:

“OK, um, were there times earlier in the night before the fire that you had to control people away from the door?” a prosecutor asked.

“No,” Vieira said.

“I guess what I’m asking you, forget the fire for a minute . . . . did you ever have to direct anyone out of the very area you were controlling?”

“Not that I recall,” Vieira said.

In fact when the fire broke out, Vieira said he was directing people toward the stage door. But most appeared driven to escape the way they had come in — through the front door.

The band, “They were out of there like Jack Flash, they were out of there probably in seconds, and then I went, yelled into the pool room area trying to get people out, to come that way, and everybody was rushing toward the front door, and I was screaming, ‘Come on people, you gotta come this way.’ ”

Vieira said he left through the stage door and then reentered the club to get people out.

“I seen it wasn’t as bad as it ended up being so I went in and I called some more people and I got, like I said maybe a dozen, 15 more people out that I know wouldn’t have made it out unless I went back in and got them … .”

tmooney@projo.com