Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (29 page)

Volunteers and professionals at the Family Assistance Center rose to the unprecedented challenge of their task. The Crowne Plaza Hotel provided food, drink, and waiters for several days. In all, the hotel served 7,500 meals and absorbed costs of $168,000. Thousands of flowers were donated by the Rhode Island Spring Flower and Garden Show, which ran that weekend. Volunteers from the Pet Assisted Therapy Association, joined by their furry empathy counselors, circulated among the families, dispensing hugs and canine kisses to children who anxiously awaited word of a missing mother or father. Even the dogs sensed serious business afoot.

At various times in the first post-fire days, Governor Carcieri addressed the crowd assembled in the grand ballroom. He had presided over countless rubber-chicken fests in this same room, but never before so tough an audience. The governor’s remarks were received with hushed silence — until he updated the death toll. Then the families’ composure dissolved in wracking sobs.

The harrowing wait for names of the dead affected Rhode Islanders well beyond the confines of the Crowne Plaza ballroom. One newspaper reporter, Meaghan Wims, put it succinctly: “In this quirky, close-knit state of roughly a million people, it’s only a matter of time before most find out that they do, indeed, ‘know someone.’ Or, they’ll know someone who knows someone.” Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch summed up his state’s insularity when interviewed on
NBC
’s
Today
show in the fire’s aftermath: “They say there are six degrees of separation in this world. In Rhode Island, there’s a degree and a half.” Not nearly enough to insulate from heartbreak.

National news organizations sometimes overlooked the state’s collective fragility. For over a week after the fire,
CNN
aired pieces by its reporter, Whitney Casey, “from on-scene in West Warwick, Rhode Island.” Producers in Atlanta kept using a horrific screen-shot of the front-door pileup at The Station as a backdrop for her reports, even as funerals began taking place in Rhode Island. When Casey realized what was happening, she immediately put a stop to it.

Even though The Station had been designated a crime scene, officials compassionately accommodated many families’ strong desire to visit the ground last touched by their loved ones. Three days after the fire, eleven buses, loaded with victims’ families and friends, made a grim pilgrimage from the Family Assistance Center to the Station site under police escort. The buses disgorged their passengers, then ringed the site, shielding grieving families from press and onlookers. It was too much for some. At least one family member was overcome and transported to a hospital by ambulance.

Many relatives simply could not wait passively for news, once they’d completed a missing-person report at the Crowne Plaza. Reminiscent of World Trade Center families, they went from hospital to hospital carrying pictures of their loved ones, hoping against hope to find a match among the dwindling number of yet-unidentified injured.

Dina DeMaio was tending the main horseshoe bar of The Station in Brian Butler’s video, smiling her thirtieth birthday smile, when fire broke out. Now her mother, Patricia Belanger, stood near the emergency entrance to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, clutching Dina’s picture and showing it to anyone who might have seen her. Approaching a reporter, she sobbed, “This is my daughter. It was her birthday yesterday. . . . Can you put her face on television?”

Rhode Island Hospital, which had admitted forty Station fire victims, still had one patient who remained unidentified. It was not Dina DiMaio. Belanger drove to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Then to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in that same city. Dina was at neither. Days later, her death would finally be confirmed.

The process was repeated by other families, usually with the same result. Gina Mattera carried two photos of her sister, Tammy, from hospital to hospital, checking lists of admissions. She showed the photos to the crowds gathered near the Station site. But no one had seen Tammy after she became separated from her friend, Erin, in the crush at the club’s front door. Tammy’s husband and two children would receive the worst possible news a few days later.

News of others was no better. Tina Ayer, the Fairfield Inn housekeeper on Jack Russell’s guest list; Steve and Keith Mancini of Fathead; Andrea Mancini, last seen at her ticket desk; Mike “Dr. Metal” Gonsalves; Karla Bagtaz — the list of the dead grew and grew.

Sometimes persistence appeared to pay off. David Penny raced to Kent County Hospital after hearing that his best friend, Kevin Anderson, was in the hospital’s intensive-care unit. But when he arrived there, no one could
find Anderson. Hopes dashed, Penny was about to leave, when an
ICU
nurse did some further checking on her own. It turned out that Anderson had been at the hospital, but was immediately airlifted to a burn center. Penny’s relief was palpable — but short-lived. His buddy died shortly thereafter at the other facility.

Hospitals faced difficult decisions when family members sought to visit seriously burned patients. Intubated, sedated patients could not identify themselves, and family members might not recognize them. The very last thing that doctors wanted was to have the wrong family at a victim’s bedside. “It would be extremely traumatic to take a patient that we had not identified and send a person in if it was not immediately apparent: ‘Is that my son or daughter, or is it not?’” explained Alasdair K. T. Conn,
MD
, chief of emergency medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. And so, until identifications were absolutely positive, families were kept at bay, adding further to their frustration.

Hospitals did their utmost to care for families, as well as patients. The waiting area of Rhode Island Hospital’s intensive care unit teemed with concerned family members who had set up a virtual encampment there. Doctors and nurses consulted with loved ones. Clergy comforted anyone willing to speak with them. The hospital did all it could, even in small ways, to comfort the afflicted. Free meals were provided to families in the hospital’s cafeteria. Parking was free to all who were “with the burn victims.” At daily meetings, Dr. William Cioffi, Rhode Island Hospital’s chief of surgery and a former army burn surgeon, briefed family members, two hundred at a time, in the hospital’s auditorium.

Given the confusion and highly emotion-charged atmosphere of the Family Assistance Center it is, perhaps, surprising that there was only one instance of erroneous family notification in the wake of the tragedy. A family was told that two of its members were hospitalized, only to learn thereafter that they were among the missing. Tragically, they were later identified as deceased.

Identification of the dead was the ultimate responsibility of the state medical examiner, Dr. Elizabeth Laposata. While her complete absence from the fire scene undoubtedly impaired the marshaling of sufficient assets during the body recovery phase, the
ME
’s work in the days following was exemplary, especially given the staffing limitations of her department.

With assistance from a federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (
DMORT
), the Rhode Island Funeral Directors Association, and the Rhode Island Dental Association, autopsies were conducted by eight teams consisting of pathologists, funeral directors, and dentists. They worked in
twelve-hour shifts, transferring bodies from refrigerated trailers at the
ME
’s office to the morgue, where directed autopsies and toxicology tests were conducted. With an average of thirty-five persons working around the clock, the autopsies of all ninety-six deceased victims removed from the scene were completed in only four days, with all identifications complete in just one more day. The successful use of dental and fingerprint records precluded the need for any
DNA
testing, further speeding the process.

In one unanticipated way, the demographics of Station fire victims played a role in their prompt identification. The popularity of tattoos among heavy-metal fans resulted in a dermatological
ID
card for many of the victims. As explained by Dr. Laposata, “When we identify people with tattoos, it doesn’t mean they weren’t severely burned, because the tattoo goes into the dermis. . . . The needles put the pigment deep, so you can even be charred and we can push off that top layer and the tattoo will be just pristine in the dermis.” Over one-third of the bodies from The Station were identified with the aid of distinctive tattoos. They included thirteen women.

As significant as what was
on
many bodies was what was
in
them. Toxicology studies revealed that twenty of the ninety-six dead at the scene had significant levels of cyanide in their bodies, a result of inhaling smoke from burning polyurethane foam. (As a general matter, the cyanide-poisoned victims were found near the stage, not near the front doors.)

One young victim’s identification was easier, and more poignant, than all the others. On his body was found a cell phone, with functioning speed-dial.

It called his mother.

CHAPTER 21

ARTIFACTS OF TRAGEDY

SEVEN DAYS AFTER THE FIRE
, an unlikely collection of volunteers — young and old, male and female — began putting in daily shifts at the frigid Station site. They brought with them buckets, shovels, and quarter-inch mesh sieves. Clad in Tyvek suits, surgical masks, goggles, and gloves, they divided the footprint of the club into five sections, then dug, filled buckets, sifted, and cataloged everything they found. And, following strict protocol, they spoke to no one among the curious onlookers.

Newspaper and web accounts speculated about who these people were and what they were doing. “They look just like archaeologists,” mused one blogger.

He guessed right.

Forensic archaeology is a relatively young discipline — an outgrowth of the science that, more traditionally, unearths artifacts to learn about historical events or ancient civilizations. Forensic, or “disaster” archaeology, however, applies the techniques and disciplines of archaeology to recent tragic events, serving more practical objectives — usually, victim identification and repatriation of their personal effects. Additionally, the fruits of forensic archaeology may become evidence in criminal or civil proceedings.

At its best, forensic archaeology harnesses objective scientific techniques to serve very subjective, emotional needs: the yearning of families for accurate word of their loved ones’ fates, and for some tangible memento of the departed. The term “closure” is much abused; however, it fairly describes the humanitarian service that forensic archaeology can sometimes render.

One of the progenitors of forensic archaeology, Dr. Richard A. Gould, was a professor at Brown University in nearby Providence at the time of the Station fire. His interest in disaster archaeology had been piqued eighteen months earlier by another tragedy — the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Professor Gould’s reaction to the horrors of
9/11 gave birth to the forensic archeology team that would later put in yeoman’s work at the Station site.

If Sean Connery had been unavailable to play Indiana Jones’s archaeologist father in
The Last Crusade
, Dr. Gould could have stood in pretty well. With his bearded face, weathered skin, and hands roughened from countless digs and wreck dives, Gould fits the image of an emeritus college professor more at home chipping relics from earthen mounds than holed up in a library. His post-9/11 experience was the genesis of “Forensic Archaeology Recovery.”

Three weeks after the fall of the twin towers in September 2001, cleanup efforts were well under way in lower Manhattan. New York’s mayor had given the order to clean up avenues, side streets, and rooftops as quickly as possible to allow residents to return to their apartments, and businesses to reopen. While few victims’ remains had been identified at that point, the hurried cleanup proceeded apace.

It was upon this scene that Richard Gould walked on October 5, 2001, from Ground Zero toward Wall Street. His archaeologist’s eye for detail immediately picked up several small fragments of bone amid the ashy dust covering the street. He did not bend to pick up any, lest he call attention to them. One larger piece, several inches across, appeared to be part of a human scapula. Gould became convinced that much of lower Manhattan had been blanketed with fragmented human remains, and that the massive cleanup activities under way were removing these remains along with other debris.