Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (24 page)

The Pickett audiotape continues for another ten minutes. Its contents are probably worse than most of us would care to imagine. As fire science suggests, many victims were instantly rendered unconscious by smoke, and thereby spared suffering. However, Matthew Pickett’s audiotape also teaches that pain and despair do not discriminate by sex, and pleas to be rescued by God or man may go unheard. In the end, its only sounds are the crackle, hiss, and pop of flames, indistinguishable from those of logs in a fireplace — sounds that in a different setting can be so comforting, but are here so profoundly disturbing.

Sadly, comparison of Joe Cristina’s “last photo,” Matthew Pickett’s audiotape, and Brian Butler’s videotape confirms that Jeff Rader missed a brief opportunity to escape through the band door after his picture was taken. Using Jack Russell’s “that’s not good” declaration as a synchronization mark on both the Pickett and Butler tapes, patrons can be seen exiting through the stage door on the Butler video at least ten seconds after Matthew Pickett yelled, “Joe! Joe! Take a picture.” Had Rader wheeled to his left and run out the band door immediately after Joe Cristina snapped his picture, he may have escaped along with those other persons. But that would have required running
toward
the flames — and away from Becky Shaw.

Disaster sociologist Lee Clarke notes that “people die the same way they live, with friends, loved ones, and colleagues — in communities. When danger arises, the rule — as in normal situations — is for people to help those next to them before they help themselves.” There is a strong tendency among individual victims to seek out friends or family and to do what those others are doing, despite what more reasoned analysis might suggest for the individual. Faced with unfamiliar life-threatening situations, humans appear to embrace groupthink and loved ones, often to their individual detriment. This phenomenon may have played a role in Rader’s, and other victims’, fates that night.

While Matthew Pickett’s recorder was memorializing sounds inside The Station, Brian Butler’s video camera continued to record the scene outside the building. As Butler clears the front doors, a woman on the tape keens, “Where’s my husband?
Where’s my husband?
”

Butler’s camera remains on as he squeezes past the atrium windows, through the narrow corridor left by Great White’s bus, which was parked parallel to them. At the building’s northwest corner, Butler’s lens captures a cluster of band members and patrons standing outside the stage door, gazing, stunned, at flames already roaring through the roof of the drummer’s alcove. Less than twenty seconds after his own exit, Butler circles back toward the front door. On his tape, a goateed man with glasses tumbles out a broken atrium window and sprints away. Black smoke belches from the window behind him as if pumped under pressure.

Ten paces later, Butler’s camera pans across the human pyramid blocking the front double doors. At least fifteen people are visible, jammed into that opening. Some are face-down. Others face-up. Still others, sideways. All wide-eyed in horror, appealing for help. Near the bottom of the pile, Erin Pucino can be seen reaching up toward the man in the leather jacket.

For the next six minutes, Butler’s camera continuously records events outside the club. On the tape, rescuers tug furiously at people stuck in the
front-door pileup. One removes his leather jacket to extend to Erin. Shamus Horan pulls victim after victim through bar windows. Jeff Derderian appears in several frames, stepping near the front door and tugging on the Budweiser banner across its railing. (He doesn’t appear to pull on anyone jammed in the doorway.) Victims stagger through the parking lot, burned and bloody after climbing through broken windows. Dozens of patrons are galvanized into action, helping in any way they can. An equal number stand frozen in shock at the unfolding horror.

Two and a half minutes after first filming the pileup at the front door, Brian Butler walks back around the band bus, returning to the stage door. On his tape a man yells, “Brandon, Brandon!” for a missing friend. Anguished screams pierce the night air. As Butler rounds the front of Great White’s bus, a man with badly burned face and hands stumbles forward, his arms outstretched and eyes saucer-wide. A voice barks, “Get this bus out of here!” Another (likely Dan Biechele) replies, “I’m trying to.”

Back at the stage exit, the repeatedly rehung door can clearly be seen. No smoke pours from this door; rather, it appears to be a source of air feeding the fire. Inside, black smoke roils within two feet of the floor. Flaming puddles of melted polyurethane foam lie about. Butler can be heard yelling, “Anybody inside?” Silence.

Behind the club, flames are shooting from the building’s eaves; smoke seeps from every wall crack of the fractured, flaming roadhouse. On the video one can see different-color siding outside the dead-end corridor to the club’s bathrooms. Subsequent investigation would reveal this to be the location of another door, removed long ago by a prior tenant or owner.

Butler returns to the front of the club, where his video captures victims collapsed in the parking lot, Harold Panciera calling for a “medic” with the unconscious man over his shoulder, and Dan Biechele tugging at the fire hose stuck beneath a car tire. Then, as flames roar from the front doorway, the first water stream is directed toward the unfortunates still trapped there. It is only six minutes since Dan Biechele touched wire to battery, kicking off Great White’s show.

One minute after firemen began hosing down the front entryway, Butler placed his still-running video camera on the asphalt parking lot beside his
WPRI-12
vehicle. He punched his cell phone and spoke with management back at the
TV
station. The videotape’s audio track recorded Butler breathlessly instructing, “You need a live truck down here
right now
. There are
multiple, multiple
deaths in this thing.”

CHAPTER 18

INTO THE BREACH

NEARLY AN HOUR AFTER HOSE STREAMS
had begun soaking the stack of charred bodies in The Station’s front entrance corridor, police and firemen began the grim task of disentangling and bagging human remains. As one fireman approached the smoldering pyre, a hand thrust out from beneath it, grabbing one of his boots. This was not possible.

Raul “Mike” Vargas, the
GNC
store manager, had been standing about three rows back from the stage when fire broke out. He was aware of the stage door, but saw that some people who first headed toward it were turning back. He heard someone yell, “This is for the band only.” So Vargas joined the human tidal wave rushing the front doors.

When people fell in front of him, the force of the crush behind him caused him to fall, too, and he soon became wedged under several layers of bodies, lying on his side, in a fetal position, his head about a foot from the outside doors. Since he was curled on his side, the weight of those above him did not compress his chest, as it would have had he lain prone. Vargas lay on the red tile floor, hands to face, within a small triangular wedge of space just within the doorway. He heard the screams of victims piled on top of him and thought of someone telling his wife and son that he had died. Fortunately, a small stream of fresh air seemed to flow past his face under the pile. A few times, when he felt liquid pouring over him, Vargas understood that death or terror had loosed the bladder of someone above him in the stack. Yet he remained calm. The only heat he felt was from the bodies wedged around him.

“If [I] freak out, I’m going to die,” thought Vargas. So he forced himself to remain still — long after all around him stopped moving and screaming; through the conflagration and the subsequent fire hose deluge. As the cold water from firefighters’ hoses ran down his face, Vargas rinsed his mouth and spat soot and cinders. With his hands, he was able to clear the water/ash
mixture from his eyes. Then, he waited, conserving his energy. Vargas heard a fireman remark, “My God, they’re all dead.” When a boot first came near, he reached out for it.

Freed of the bodies on top of him, Vargas sat up. The persons beside him and on top of him were dead — burned so completely that he could not tell if they were male or female. Then, Vargas stood, descended the club’s concrete steps, and began walking to his car, with firefighters staring in disbelief. “Don’t look back,” Vargas thought. “If I look back, I’ll really be messed up.” Firemen insisted that he be placed on a gurney and transported by ambulance to a hospital. When they took his vital signs,
EMT
s noted the time — 12:35 a.m. — ninety minutes after the fire’s outbreak.

Mike Vargas was discharged the following afternoon from Miriam Hospital in Providence with small burns on his left leg. Several days after the fire, he returned to The Station and gazed down at the red tile floor where he had lain. It was heat-blackened, except for the small patch of tiles that had been directly beneath him.

Lieutenant Roger St. Jean was a sixteen-year veteran of the West Warwick Fire Department, assigned to Station 4, only a half mile from The Station on Cowesett Avenue. On February 20, 2003, he was working on D Platoon, a night shift beginning at 5:30 p.m. and ending at 7:30 the next morning. St. Jean was responsible for Engine 4, his station’s pumper truck. (Each station had a pumper truck and ladder truck referred to by the station’s number — that is, Ladder 1 was the ladder truck from Station 1; Engine 4, the pumper from Station 4.)

Firehouses still use fire bells. Some still use poles. At 11:10 p.m. the bell at Station 4 sounded, and the intercom barked that there was a “building fire at The Station” that had been reported by police. St. Jean and his partner on Engine 4, Private Aaron Perkins, knew by the reference to a police call that this was the real thing. In seconds, Engine 4 was roaring out of its bay with Perkins behind the wheel and St. Jean manning its radio. It was followed immediately by Ladder 4, staffed by Privates Norman Landroche and David Pimental.

Given the close proximity of Station 4 to the fire, it was only a minute between St. Jean’s “on the way” radio transmission and his ominous report as “first-in engine.” “Heavy fire showing,” advised St. Jean. The intensity of the fire suggested to the lieutenant that it was “being fed by something . . . almost like a gasoline-fed fire.” Considering the thousand square feet of hydrocarbon-based plastic foam lining the club’s walls, he was not far off.