Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (49 page)

The one-year anniversary of the Station fire was a turning point for Kingston. Whenever the investigator opened his morning newspaper, there were retrospectives about the fire. When he turned on his car radio, all talk was about the fire and its aftermath. If he clicked his
TV
remote, he was bombarded with images long suppressed in his memory. Kingston began to decompensate into profound post-traumatic stress syndrome. Within weeks, his blood sugar became absolutely uncontrollable. With additional insulin, his count would sometimes paradoxically
increase
. As a result, Jay developed an intractable condition in his right eye called flash neovascular glaucoma. By the following August, the eye could not be saved. Kingston now wears a glass prosthesis in its place. He joins Joe Kinan, the most severely burned fire survivor, in an unfortunate distinction — each lost an eye to the Station fire.

Kingston’s boss, Chief State Medical Examiner Elizabeth Laposata,
MD
, who never found it necessary to report to the Station site, resigned her position in June 2005 after a Health Department investigation discovered that
reports were never written for hundreds of autopsies. Her successors have been more willing to actually attend crime scenes, and file paperwork.

Notwithstanding Dr. Laposata’s apparent reluctance to view dead bodies in situ, she found employment in 2010 as medical adviser to a television show,
Body of Proof
, about a crime-solving female medical examiner. Her job entailed advising makeup artists on how to depict gruesome injuries.

West Warwick town building official Stephen Murray, who last inspected The Station just two months before it burned, was fired one day short of the fire’s fifth anniversary. According to the
Providence Journal
, the town council’s unanimous vote to terminate him on February 19, 2008, took “less than two minutes,” with “no discussion” and “no rebuttal.” Better late than never, one would suppose.

West Warwick fire chief Charles D. Hall (“Our inspector missed nothing. They were in compliance.”) retired from his job in January 2008, to manage a fire and rescue squad at the state airport.

Even more complex retirement plans were carried out by Denis Larocque, the West Warwick fire marshal who overlooked flammable foam on The Station’s walls during multiple inspections, and increased the club’s permitted capacity from 258 to 317, then to 404, at the request of Michael Derderian. In 2005, Larocque voluntarily left the fire marshal’s job and returned to actual firefighting, remaining a battalion chief in the West Warwick Fire Department. About that lateral move, Chief Hall gushed, “[Larocque] was doing a good job where he was, and he’ll do a good job where he is.” (Hall did not elaborate on what might constitute doing a
bad
job of fire inspection in West Warwick.)

Then, in mid-2006, Larocque began a period of absence from his job for a “job-related injury.” Eighteen months later, he applied for a permanent disability pension, which, under his union contract, would pay him two-thirds of his salary for life, tax-free, with proportional future increases as active firefighters’ salaries rose. The contract also provided that grant of his disability pension could not be challenged, because Larocque had been out on disability for eighteen continuous months. “After 18 months, there’s nothing the Pension Board can do to disallow a disability pension. It becomes automatic,” explained the chairman of West Warwick’s pension board, Geoffrey Rousselle. According to Rousselle, the responsibility for monitoring Larocque’s medical condition during his eighteen months on disability, to determine whether he was actually disabled, fell to the town manager and the fire chief — Wolfgang Bauer and Charles Hall.

Barry Warner, the American Foam Corporation salesman and next-door
neighbor of the club, left his job at American Foam more than a year before the fire. His house can be seen through a thin stand of trees, just behind the oval of one hundred tilting crosses at 211 Cowesett Avenue. It’s hard to say whether Warner’s property was previously more devalued by a loud rock club next door or, presently, by the quarter-acre of makeshift memorials to horror.

Warner’s grim front-yard tableau brings to mind the U.S. government’s acquisition of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s homestead in Arlington, Virginia, for use as a national cemetery during the Civil War. In August of 1864, the Union buried twenty-six bodies along the edge of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, in close proximity to the mansion, “rendering it undesirable as a future residence or homestead.” Thousands more followed, along with a tomb for unknown Civil War dead, right
in
the rose garden itself. The Lees never returned to their family home.

On any given day, several people stop by the site of the Station fire. The loudest sound is the soft crunch of their footfalls in the gravel bordering the one hundred victim memorials. Visitors speak in respectful, hushed tones.

Barry Warner still owns the house directly behind the Station site. And, in one small, completely unintended way, he has gotten his wish.

It is very, very quiet there now.

EPILOGUE

CHANGE WAS INEVITABLE FOR THE VICTIMS
of the Station fire. The tragedy left some physically scarred, but mentally strong. Others, who were spared serious physical injury, remain ravaged by post-traumatic stress syndrome. Specific individuals’ resilience in the aftermath of the event has been completely unpredictable. Many have bounced back, but for others the fire remains the single defining event of their lives.

Linda Fisher, who made her escape through an atrium window of the club, underwent multiple surgeries in the months and years after the fire. Her arms bear deep burn scars, but she wears them like a badge of courage. Sleeveless tops and motorcycle leathers remain part of her wardrobe. Linda has not let her injuries slow her down or diminish her self-esteem. Divorce and remarriage followed the fire, but so did a new house and a new life.

Harold Panciera, who appears on the Brian Butler video with an unconscious man over his shoulder, now sells oceanfront real estate in Narragansett, Rhode Island. He still looks like he could hoist a two-hundred-pounder on his back — when he’s not building custom motorcycles, his new post-fire avocation.

Gina Russo, who with her boyfriend Fred Crisostomi was turned away from the band door by a Station bouncer, still bears the physical scars of her ordeal. But she’s back to work as a medical secretary and performs volunteer work for the Phoenix Society, a national support group for burn victims. Her recovery was facilitated by a new love in her life. Gina and he were married in 2007.

Shamus Horan, who pulled multiple victims to safety through the club’s windows, still pursues his hobby of off-road four-wheeling (in vehicles he’s modified himself) when not working as a union pipefitter. Construction jobs like his have been hard hit by the recession. But Horan and his wife continue to count their blessings. She, too, escaped The Station’s flames. They married not long after the fire.

Peter Ginaitt, the registered nurse / rescue captain who codirected the successful triage and transportation of 188 victims on the night of the fire,
retired from the Warwick Fire Department and took a position as director of emergency preparedness for the state’s largest hospital network. He left his elected position of state representative in 2007. It’s not known whether Ginaitt will run for higher office in the future, but if he does, he’ll certainly be a lock for those 188 votes.

Mickey Mikutowicz, whose squirreling of discarded polyethylene foam blocks from 1996 enabled the Station fire victims to recover an additional $25 million dollars in settlement from Sealed Air Corporation, continues to ply his landscaping and snowboard instructor trades by day. By night, his tribute band, Believer, still appears at New England clubs, where Mickey’s uncanny resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne puts him in good stead.

Gina Gauvin, the breeder of pet reptiles, was released from an acute-care hospital to a rehabilitation hospital two months after the fire. She had spent the first six weeks after the fire in a medically induced coma. When Gina finally emerged from the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island in late July 2003, she was horrifically scarred, but her spirit was clearly unbroken. Surgeons had constructed a rudimentary thumb and fingers from the remainder of her right hand. Her left hand was amputated at mid-forearm. Fortunately, Gina’s bright-red hair remains so thick that she can brush it over the skin-grafted areas covering half her scalp.

Gina’s children are now ten years older, and she is a recent grandmother. She lives independently and still cares for her beloved lizards. Born left-handed, Gina now paints with her right hand. Life will never be the same for her. But she is very grateful for that life. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” Gauvin observes.

My need to write about the fire, and its human and legal aftermath, became apparent when the criminal and civil actions resolved without trials, leaving the public clamoring for “answers.” I knew that most of the answers were contained in public records. However, the sheer volume of those records made marshaling the evidence daunting for any but the most committed researcher. To use an unfortunate phrase in the context of this case, making sense of it all was like trying to drink from a fire hose. Having worked on the legal aspects of the case, however, I had a framework for organizing that surfeit of information into a comprehensible work. At least, that was my objective.

The mere telling (or retelling) of interesting stories, however, is not a very lofty goal if no useful lessons can be drawn from them. A tragedy like the Station fire should, if nothing else, force us to examine how we conduct our
lives and businesses. Work on the case, and the book, certainly caused me to do so.

I came to realize that every day we make unconscious calculations, balancing the risks of our actions against their potential benefits. Sometimes we incur risk on our own behalf, reaping the benefits, or suffering the consequences, personally. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.

But, as often as not, the equation is skewed. Potential benefit is all ours (a saved minute or two in travel, a saved dollar or two in safety precautions not taken), but the risk falls disproportionately upon others. In such situations, it’s easy for us to take risks.

I believe that our risk/benefit calculating is rarely done on a conscious level. It is often born of habit — habitual speeding; habitual corruption; habitually running a business “on the cheap” so as to eke out every last dime of profit. Only when disaster strikes, and others take the fall, do we ever stop to do the math.

Legal scholars, like the famous Judge Learned Hand, have attempted to describe reasonable conduct as that in which the societal benefit of an activity is greater than its risk. But risk to whom? And judged at what point in time? Hindsight may be 20/20, but is it fair to view the acts and omissions of players in the Station fire tragedy in this way? I would suggest that it is eminently fair, and a necessary exercise, lest history repeat itself.