Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (2 page)

It wasn’t long before the sweater and jeans from Casey’s “crash bag” (on hand for just such short-notice call-outs) proved a poor match for New England’s winter. Shivering alongside the yellow tape line, the
CNN
reporter spotted State Fire Marshal Irving J. “Jesse” Owens huddling with West Warwick fire chief Charles Hall. She heard questions shouted by her fellow reporters: “Chief, how recently was the club inspected?” “What was the club’s capacity?” “Who put that foam up on the walls?” Neither responded. Nor would anyone in authority answer those and other critical questions for a very long time.

State Fire Marshal Owens had the world-weary look of someone who
had been investigating fires for thirty years. Thin of hair and pudgy of build, Owens had seen many fatal fires before. But none like this. He had to have heard the reporters’ shouted questions in the same way one hears his doctor prattle on after having first pronounced the word “cancer” — as a faint sound drowned out by the rush of racing thoughts. Owens had a lot on his mind. Ten hours before the fire, he had given an interview to Bryan Rourke, a
Providence Journal
reporter, on the subject of a recent Chicago nightclub stampede in which twenty-one people had been killed. “It’s very remote something like that would happen here,” opined Owens. Now he wondered whether the phone message he left for Rourke while on his way to the Station conflagration would stop that story from running. “I guess we spoke too soon,” he said in a dejected voice-mail postscript.

Owens had arrived at The Station to find it fully consumed by fire, and triage of survivors already under way. Amid the crackle of flames and din of sirens, his cell phone rang. The caller
ID
displayed his home number. His wife’s first words were, “Jesse, Chris is missing.” “Who?” “Your nephew, Chris. He went to The Station last night and they can’t find him. Can you?” Given the stench of death around him, Owens must have thought, “I certainly don’t want to find him here.”

The fire marshal was hardly alone in looking for family. Because video of the fire had been broadcast almost immediately, distraught relatives of Station patrons flocked to the scene when their cell phone calls to loved ones went unanswered. Over the next several days, they would go from hospital to hospital in Providence, Boston, and Worcester, clutching photos for doctors to match to horrifically burned faces. And with each “not here,” the families’ options would shrink.

Even though reporters were kept at a distance from the burnt-out rubble,
TV
crews had something of an advantage. Television “live” trucks often sport video cameras on their telescoping communication masts, from which their crews can peer down upon “restricted access” scenes. Reporters like
CNN’S
Casey watched on their monitors as blue-gloved fire investigators combed through what looked, at a distance, like indistinguishable ashes. Had she been allowed closer (or if her truck’s mast camera had a higher resolution) she would have seen those techs bagging and labeling victims’ personal effects and body parts. A glove containing hand bones. A section of scalp, with hair attached. And, over by what remained of the stage, several charred cardboard tubes for pyrotechnic “gerbs” — a kind of heavy-duty sparkler — as well as a homemade stand for positioning them. These were the first of many discoveries that would begin to answer questions in the minds of everyone
from Providence to Portugal who had seen the initial video: Why did the fire spread so fast? What was flammable packing foam doing on the walls of a nightclub? How could any thinking person ignite giant sparklers in that firetrap?

Throughout the night of the fire and into the next day, the news media reported body counts like a ghoulish sports score. First thirty-nine, “with fears of many more.” Then fifty, “and climbing.” By 11 a.m., the removal of body bags from what remained of The Station had ceased, with the “final” calculus an astounding ninety-five.

That afternoon, Fire Marshal Owens’s cell phone roused him from his overwhelming fatigue. It was his wife, telling him they’d found his nephew — at Rhode Island Hospital — burned, but alive.

But many more remained missing. Shortly after the video aired, the region’s hospitals began filling with relatives looking for their loved ones. There, smoke-stained survivors attempted to comfort them with information about where a son or daughter was last seen within the club. Other injured Station patrons chose to leave hospitals, untreated, in deference to the more seriously burned in need of urgent care. That night, Kent County Memorial Hospital, closest to the fire site, went through a three-month supply of morphine.

Yet more friends and family members were drawn to the still-smoking remains of the club, where they stood, hugging and weeping. One was Jackie Bernard, forty years old, who stared at the smoldering rubble and cried softly. She had been inside the club with her close friend and co-worker Tina Ayer when fire broke out. Both worked as housekeepers at the Fairfield Inn, where Great White was staying. Tina was still missing.

No one among those gathered at the site took any particular notice of one fireman lingering in the footprint of the burned-out club. “Rocky” was a familiar figure at fire scenes; as the town’s fire marshal, part of his job was investigating the cause and origin of fires there. As the fire marshal’s turn-out boots crunched in the ruins, he must have had the appalling realization that the ground beneath him was intermixed with what funeral directors euphemistically call “cremains.” And only he could have known that he was, perhaps, the single person most responsible for this tragedy.

When the claw-armed excavating machine lifted the remaining section of collapsed roof from the club, another grim discovery was made.

The count was now ninety-six.

CHAPTER 2

MILL TOWN WATERING HOLE

IF WEST WARWICK, RHODE ISLAND, WERE A CAR,
it would be a 1957 Studebaker — functional in its day, but now well past its prime. It has the look and feel of a place that time, and certainly prosperity, have long since passed by.

Driving through the town today, one can catch glimpses of its industrial past. Hulking textile mills, some boarded up, some converted to “luxury condos,” line the Pawtuxet River’s banks. Mill workers’ duplexes still squat in the river’s floodplain, while owners’ mansions, many now decrepit, occupy the high ground. Mac’s Bowlaway Lanes, its paint peeling, sits cheek-by-jowl with Louise’s Liquors. A red J. J. Newberry storefront harks back to its halcyon days as a sponsor of
TV’S
Romper Room
, while the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society and St. Anthony’s Church remind visitors that Masses are still said in languages other than English or Latin.

West Warwick homes are, for the most part, pre–World War II vintage, often multifamily, and set impossibly close to one another. Vinyl siding over rotted wood is the dominant aesthetic. Which is not to say that pride in ownership does not occasionally shine through. Carefully tended window boxes grace otherwise bleak tenements. Manicured postage-stamp lawns hold their own against incursion by overgrown neighboring plots. In short, the town has seen much better days, but its close-knit, often blood-related residents refuse to give up on it. Which is one reason why tragedy hit so close, and so hard, that winter of 2003.

West Warwick may lie at the geographic center of America’s smallest state, but by 2003 it was as far from the state’s economic and cultural mainstream as could be. It had not always been so. Indeed, the town’s very existence was an ironic testament to greedy calculation.

With straight borders to its north, west, and south and a tortured, winding
border to the east, the town appears to have been forcibly wrested from its easterly neighbor, Warwick — which is exactly what happened. While political subdivisions often use waterways as natural borders, West Warwick clings jealously to
both
banks of the Pawtuxet as that river makes its way east to Narragansett Bay. And that was the beauty of Patrick Quinn’s 1913 plan.

By the early 1900s, Warwick’s Pawtuxet River Valley was the state’s most industrialized and politically powerful region. Generations of immigrants had settled in ethnic enclaves bearing names like Arctic, Crompton, and Riverpoint. French Canadians, Irish, Poles, and Portuguese huddled among their own in neighborhoods often named for the area’s mill owners, such as Lippitt, Clyde, or Harris. While Patrick Quinn’s “come-over” Irish parents had labored in the mills, he would rise above those humble beginnings to become a lawyer and politician of influence, riding the tide of political change that transformed Rhode Island from a
WASP
-dominated Republican state to the ethnic Democratic one-party city-state it remains to this day.

Quinn’s plan was to split West Warwick from Warwick so as to seize both banks of the Pawtuxet — and its golden-goose textile mills — from the largely Republican eastern area of the city. It worked like a charm. As its first town council president, Quinn promptly appointed his nephew and law partner as city solicitor. Together they would dominate the affairs of the newly incorporated municipality for decades.

Quinn’s creation remained prosperous through the 1940s and into the ’50s. Fruit of the Loom products made in West Warwick stocked America’s underwear drawers. Weekdays, often in three shifts, a League of Nations labored in the mills. On weekends, its ambassadors would spend their overtime checks in Arctic’s bustling retail center.

Then came the late ’50s and ’60s. One by one, the mills shut down, heading south for cheaper labor, while new shopping centers sprang up in neighboring Warwick. In 1958, when Interstate Highway 95 was completed through Warwick proper, there was simply no reason for anyone to drive to Arctic to shop — or to visit West Warwick at all. By 2003, eastern Warwick had become the retail hub of Rhode Island and site of the state’s newly modernized airport, its tax base almost five times that of its western spin-off. Quinn’s dream of an independently prosperous West Warwick effectively died with him in 1956.

Recent unsuccessful attempts to revitalize West Warwick have ranged from the desperate to the comical. First, there was the proposal to create a tax-free shopping zone (dead on arrival in the legislature). Then, casting envious glances at one of the world’s largest casinos, in nearby Ledyard, Connecticut, West Warwick pols teamed with Harrah’s to develop a Narragansett
Indian casino (defeated in multiple referenda). Most recently, plans for a “destination-resort indoor water park” were floated. (Progress on that slowed appreciably in the state legislature when rumors swirled that it was really an
FBI
sting operation, thereby seriously impairing its graft potential.)

With economic downturns often come fire and arson, and West Warwick was not spared their ravages. From the destruction of the Roger Williams mill in 1821 to the Crompton Mills fire in 1992, the town saw one spectacular blaze after another. In fact, following one such fire, a West Warwick neighborhood was renamed Phenix, after the mythological bird that rose from the ashes.

A mill fire is a sight to behold. With foot-thick timbers and floors marinated in decades of machine oil, old textile mills burn with ferocious intensity, producing inky smoke visible for miles. Many such West Warwick fires had human help. In the 1990s a string of twenty unsolved arson fires plagued the town, creating a persistent feeling of unease among its residents.