Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (23 page)

Once Erin Pucino regained feeling in her legs, she shuffled, zombielike, around The Station’s parking lot searching for her friend Laurie Hussey. By then, flames had engulfed the entire building and firemen were retreating from the collapsing structure. At that point, the club was no more than a huge funeral pyre. Barely ten minutes had elapsed since Great White set off its pyrotechnics, and now all hope was lost.

Pucino reached for her cell phone and punched in Laurie’s home number. She had lost her best friend in the crush of escape, and now she would break the terrible news to Laurie’s husband, who had stayed home that night with their two children. As Pucino tearfully explained the tragedy to him, the connection suddenly went dead. Laurie’s husband had disconnected to take a waiting call — from Laurie, shivering in another corner of the parking lot. She had suffered only minor burns. Laurie thereafter got through to Erin’s cell with the news: they had both been spared.

CHAPTER 17

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

“
OH, MY GOD! OH, MY GOD! I HAVE CHILDREN!
” screamed one woman at the back of the pack, imploring the crowd at the front door to miraculously part and make an exception for her. But she was not exceptional. Sixty-four children under the age of eighteen would lose one or both parents at The Station that night.

Her terrified voice was picked up by Brian Butler’s video camera, just as he exited the front doors. Butler’s real-time record of the fire continued thereafter, but from an exterior vantage point. Initially, there was believed to be no further audio or visual record of events within the club after he exited. However, that belief changed with discoveries in the months and years following the fire.

In the new millennium, it is unlikely that any newsworthy event will ever go unrecorded. Most adult Americans carry with them a camera phone (and many of them actually know how to use its camera function). High-resolution digital cameras and audio recorders are now small enough to fit in a pocket. Thus, not only was the Station fire videotaped professionally by Brian Butler, but several patrons brought visual or sound recording devices along to the concert. It was inevitable that some would be in use when tragedy struck.

Joe Cristina and Matthew Pickett came from nearby southern Massachusetts to see Great White at The Station. Joe owned every one of their
CD
s. The pair had been to the club five or six times before to see groups like Slaughter, the Bullet Boys, and Lynch Mob. Neither was drawn there by the Budweiser promotion. Matthew had recently celebrated his seventh year of sobriety and was engaged to marry in the fall. But rock ’n’ roll, as the song goes, is a harder habit to break.

The two arrived at The Station fully prepared to memorialize their Great White experience, Joe with digital camera in hand and Matthew with his Sony
DAT
(digital audio tape) Walkman recorder tucked in the pocket of his denim jacket. Matthew was a collector. He collected photos, records, and
tapes, often of groups he’d seen in concert. He had no idea that on this night he would collect sounds depicting The Station’s descent into hell.

When Joe Cristina and Matthew Pickett entered the club, they found it more crowded than they had ever seen it. The men elbowed their way to Linda Fisher’s table in the atrium area, where they checked out band merchandise. They watched as Brian Butler filmed the crowd for Channel 12, and listened as Dr. Metal worked up the Great White fans, throwing merchandise into the audience.

When the featured act began, and its pyro went off, Joe and Matthew were standing fifteen feet in front of the large speaker to the right of the stage. They saw the gerbs’ glare, but not the flaming walls behind them. As people started to retreat, Joe initially thought it was because a fight had broken out. Immediately thereafter, both of them noticed the flames. Matthew urged Joe to take a photo of the fire. Then, the two of them paused briefly while the area in front of the stage cleared, so they could take a good picture. Joe snapped one shot, the last taken inside the club, then headed for the front door, at which point he and Matthew became separated in the smoky darkness. Joe knew about the stage door exit, but did not want to go toward the flames, which by then extended above that nearby doorway.

In his rush to leave, Joe dropped his camera, bent to pick it up, and stuffed it into his fanny pack. This action may have saved him from a knockdown lungful of toxins, because by then the smoke layer had descended to mid-chest level. Blackness overtook him. He covered his nose with his shirt and began crawling on his hands and knees. He was in this position when someone trampled his leg, knocking his right sneaker off. Joe did not know where he was, but briefly saw a spot of light to his left and someone going through that spot. He crawled toward the light, tucked his head, and dropped out what he later learned was an atrium window. Once outside, Cristina made his way to a snowbank and plunged his heat-blistered hands into it.

Matthew Pickett’s
DAT
Walkman remained in the pocket of his jacket, which was recovered from the ashes of The Station the next day, along with his lifeless body. At Matthew’s funeral, an employee of the funeral home delivered two plastic bags to the family of the deceased. They contained Matthew’s personal effects. One of his brothers placed the bags in a closet in his parents’ home, where they remained, unexamined, for almost a year. In early February 2004, another brother removed the bags from his parents’ house and brought them to his home, where he examined their contents: they included credit cards, heat-fused into a ball of plastic, and a soot-blackened
Sony
DAT
Walkman, scorched but otherwise intact. He contacted the Rhode Island State Fire Marshal’s Office about his find, and a detective from the West Warwick Police Department took custody of it, almost a year to the day after the recorder last saw use.

Joe Cristina’s single image from inside the club would not have to wait nearly as long as Matthew Pickett’s tape to be studied. Two months after the fire, Joe delivered a floppy disk with that photo to the West Warwick police. And a strange photo it was. This final image recorded within the burning nightclub reveals, at the left edge of the frame, Matthew Pickett’s striped sweater sleeve. In the background is the stage, with walls and amplifiers fully engulfed in flames. At the photo’s right edge, a wooden pillar separates the atrium from the stage area. And in the center of the photo stands a man with shoulder-length hair, rimless eyeglasses, and an expression of utter calm. In his right hand he holds a lit cigarette at his side; in his left, a drink. His jacket is casually draped over his left forearm. On the left breast of the man’s shirt appears the logo of a California rock group, Tesla. The smoke layer has descended almost to his head. In a few seconds it will be opaque and unbreathable. The man’s preternatural calm suggests, perhaps unfairly, that he neither knows nor cares.

Not visible in the picture, but about fifteen feet behind and to the man’s left, is the open stage door, which he knew well. He had worked as a roadie, loading in several rock groups, including Tesla, through that door. His name was Jeff Rader. And he never made it out.

Rader, thirty-two, lived with his mother in Danville, California. Drawn to rock ’n’ roll at a young age, Rader had been traveling with bands like Great White and Tesla, hauling their gear and setting up instruments. It was on a trip to Rhode Island six months earlier that he met his girlfriend, Becky Shaw, twenty-four, of Warwick. Regular visits east to see her followed. During his visit in February 2003, Jeff and Becky surprised Great White by meeting them at The Station during their load-in. His reunion with John Kubus, Great White’s bus driver, was a happy one, and the two of them drove Becky’s car on errands that afternoon.

Rader and Shaw returned to the club that night for Great White’s appearance. No one knows where Becky was standing when the band’s pyro went off. She, too, perished inside the club.

Joe Cristina’s last picture of Jeff Rader is like a Rorschach test for its viewer. Several interpretations are possible. Does the subject not appreciate his imminent danger? Is he observing the crowd backed up at the front entrance,
perhaps looking for Becky Shaw within it? Is he beginning to walk in the direction of the front entrance? Is he fully cognizant of the futility of any escape attempt and calmly resigned to his fate?

What is clear is that Rader did not turn and sprint out the open band door, just fifteen feet behind him. Whether that was because he was loath to leave without Becky, or naturally hesitant to head toward the flames, Rader’s failure to use a nearby exit with which he was familiar may have been at least partly due to the naïveté described by Professor Proulx in her work on crowd fire behavior. We know that we can stand in front of a fireplace for hours without injury. The idea that a structure fire can overtake and kill in seconds is quite foreign to us. That innocence of fire’s rapid destructive power costs victims critical seconds — and, frequently, their lives.

One question raised by Joe Cristina’s last photo inside the club is whether, at the moment it was snapped, it was too late for Jeff Rader to escape through the stage door. The answer to that question would not come until years after the fire, and would require Matthew Pickett’s posthumous assistance.

When Detective Roland Coutu of the West Warwick Police Department took custody of Matthew Pickett’s singed Walkman a year after the fire, he knew that examining its contents was a job for a specialist; the recorder’s cassette hatch was fused shut, and Coutu had no idea if the digital tape inside contained data of any kind, much less sounds from the night of the fire.

Because fireworks had sparked the Station blaze, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (
ATF
) had been involved in its investigation from the outset. Steve Greene, an audio/video forensic specialist at
ATF
, was tapped to look into Matthew Pickett’s Walkman. His work did not begin in earnest until November 2004.

The
ATF
investigator began by using a center punch, X-Acto knife, and spacer tool to pop out the cassette drawer. What he found inside was encouraging. The digital audio cassette’s “record protect” tab was in the “off” position, indicating that the device could have been operating at the moment of the fire. But the condition of the cassette itself gave him pause. It had burn and soot damage “everywhere.” There was no way the tape could be successfully played within that cassette. Greene would have to disassemble the cassette itself, remove and clean the tape, and then transfer it to a new cassette for attempted playback.

Restoration of the Pickett tape stretched into January 2005, almost two full years after the fire. At that time, Greene successfully opened the heat-damaged cassette and removed its tape from the two spools within. He unwound the thin tape to expose its most damaged and dirty sections, cleaning
them with liquid Freon (the same refrigerant/solvent used in air conditioning systems) on the end of a cotton swab. Fearful of removing magnetic material, Greene went easy with his cleaning, and then placed the tape into a new cassette housing. He hand-rewound the tape past its most damaged section, placed the cassette into a new
DAT
Walkman, and pressed “rewind.”

The tape immediately broke.

Greene excised a small weakened section of tape (preserving it separately as evidence), then spliced the cut ends and rewound the entire tape — this time by hand. Placed back in the Walkman, the reconstructed cassette ran smoothly. Greene transferred its data to a computer, which “burned” it onto a
CD
.

The result of Steve Greene’s restoration work is a chilling audio glimpse where no one should ever look. But to turn away is to blind ourselves to the terrible reality of what can happen to people when negligence and greed trump concern for safety.

Pickett’s tape begins with fifteen minutes of pre–Great White crowd noise, recorded background music, and snippets of pleasant conversation between himself and Joe Cristina — talk of other concerts; speculation as to when Great White will come on. Then, Dr. Metal can be heard onstage hawking Budweiser and pumping up the crowd. A few minutes later, the opening chords of Great White’s “Desert Moon” are reproduced with perfect digital fidelity. Eight bars of instrumental introduction; then crowd roar as the gerbs erupt; twelve more bars of introduction before Jack Russell’s vocals begin.

Great White’s front man is into his second line of lyrics when a girl yells, “Get out, fire!” Three seconds later, the band stops playing. Mark Kendall’s lead guitar line is the last to trail off. Four seconds thereafter — at seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds into Matthew Pickett’s tape — Jack Russell declares, “Wow. That’s not good.”

Another four seconds after that, a man shouts, “
Get the fuck outta here!
” And five seconds later, Matthew Pickett yells, “Joe! Joe! Take a picture!” Joe Cristina then snapped his single photo of Jeff Rader standing in front of the stage, before making his own narrow escape through an atrium window.