Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (19 page)

Gary figured they had no more than a minute to get out. But progress toward the front door had slowed almost to a stop, with people in front of them moving only a half-step at a time. By this time, smoke had filled the raised ceiling area above the stage and begun to roll across the dropped ceiling covering the rest of the club, descending closer and closer to their heads.

The front door looked impossible, so Gary and Pam ducked down below the smoke layer and worked their way to the main bar windows. Gary tried kicking one window out with a sneaker-shod foot. It just bounced off. One kick. Two kicks. Three. The glass wouldn’t yield. “The smoke was now getting lower and we were almost on our knees trying to get air. Just then, another man freed a latch securing one of the smaller bar windows, and slid its lower sash up. Gary followed him, diving headfirst out the window, assuming Pam was right behind him. But nothing followed Gary out of that window “but black billowing smoke.” Beineke reached back inside and, working blind, felt someone. He pulled that person through the opening. It was not Pam.

In his rising terror, Beineke strained to look into the bar through the smoke, where he saw flames roll over the bar’s ceiling, igniting the layer of unburned gaseous fuel there. Silhouetted against that orange glow was a woman. Beineke lunged and grabbed, dragging Pam through the window opening. He propped her up against the wall of the building, between the window she’d just exited and the double picture window next to it. But both could hear loud banging and saw the glass of the picture window bulge outward.

Just as Gary pulled Pam away from the bulging glass, it shattered, and two people exploded through it onto the concrete below. They were immediately followed by others who landed right on top of them. Several seconds later, “someone on fire” fell out the window they had just exited, onto the ground at their feet. People near them used jackets to try to smother his flames. As
the scene at the front of the club became increasingly horrific, Gary and Pam stumbled to their car, with singed hair and scraped limbs.

The area of the bar windows was the site of selfless heroics on the night of the fire. One beneficiary was Stephanie Simpson. She had passed out from the smoke, just short of the bar windows. She later came to “on fire,” and praying, “Oh God, don’t take me, but if you do, do it quickly.” Suddenly, Simpson felt herself being picked up by her right arm and the back of her pants and tossed through an open window. Someone dragged her to a snow bank and covered her head and face with snow. Stephanie’s next memory was awakening in a hospital bed, with no idea who threw her, or whether that person escaped.

Another person who escaped through a window, with help, was Katherine Randall. She and her boyfriend had made it as far as the bar windows when flame began to “cruise across the ceiling” and a wall of smoke hit them. She describes a knockdown effect of the smoke that was instantaneous. “There was no breathing. I just went down. It was like passing out.” Randall thought, “I was just gonna go to sleep . . . that’s how I’m going.” Suddenly, she felt herself being “yanked up.” She could see headlights in the parking lot through a window in front of her. Her boyfriend pushed her toward the window, and a woman reached through from outside, grabbed her shoulders, and pulled her out. “The light was behind her, so all I could see was her face,” recalls Randall. “I saw her like she was God.”

Mike Ricardi, a nineteen-year-old Nichols College student, would also be thankful for his escape from The Station that night. He and his college buddy Jimmy Gahan had interviewed Russell in his tour bus earlier in the evening. Ricardi and Gahan returned to the club around 9:30 and entered on Russell’s “guest list.” They took their places toward the right side of the hall facing the stage, only two rows back from the performers — normally a choice spot. When fire broke out, both turned and pressed toward the front door, but soon got separated in the thick smoke.

Ricardi dropped beneath the smoke layer and pushed through the choking darkness. When progress toward the front doors stopped completely, Mike despaired of ever escaping — then, he envisioned his late grandfather, a Worcester, Massachusetts, firefighter who had died in a burning building. He was telling Mike, “I went that way; you’re not going to.” Ricardi was somehow able to crawl around the ticket area into the front of the main bar, where he dove out a broken window.

Ricardi’s relief and thankfulness for having escaped unhurt were, however,
tempered by a profound loss. Just seven days later he was a pallbearer at Jimmy Gahan’s funeral.

As Jimmy Gahan’s fate proved that night, a spot on Jack Russell’s guest list could be a dubious honor. The Denny’s breakfast gang, led by Rick Sanetti, would find it a mixed blessing. They totaled nine, including Sanetti’s wife, Patty, and niece, Bridget. Patty left the club just before Great White went on. Of the eight remaining, only five would escape the fire.

The Sanetti party congregated in the main bar area of The Station immediately before the main act. Among them was Katie O’Donnell, Bridget Sanetti’s friend, whom she had brought along for the free night out. Minutes before Great White went on, Katie and Bridget headed for the ladies’ room. When the fire started, they had not yet returned to their group. About fifteen seconds after flames first appeared, Rick Sanetti “believed in his heart right then that the building was going to burn” and tried to gather his party to leave by the closest door — the bar exit. They were headed toward that door when the smoke layer descended in the bar. Sanetti found himself in a crush of choking people trying to fit through one thirty-six-inch door.

Finally, the crowd burst out the door and deposited him in a stack of people on the steps outside. Sanetti worked himself free of the pile, then ran around the corner of the building where he hoped to find his niece. There, instead, he found broken windows with people tumbling out with hair aflame. He stood beside Shamus Horan and tried to help people through window openings, all the while screaming for Bridget. But neither Bridget nor Katie was seen again.

At 11:17 p.m. a West Warwick police dispatcher received a 911 call from “a female trapped inside and in need of help.” If Bridget Sanetti and Katie O’Donnell were in the ladies’ room as fire consumed the dead-end corridor to the restrooms, the two young women had little chance of rescue. According to the
NIST
computer simulations, temperatures in that corridor topped 600°F, and its oxygen concentration dropped below 2 percent within a minute and a half of the fire’s ignition. Firemen with breathing apparatus arrived at The Station four minutes later. Long after the fire, when Richard Sanetti was permitted to retrieve his niece’s possessions from the medical examiner’s office, Bridget’s cell phone was among those personal effects. The last three numbers dialed by her were 911.

Back at the front windows of the bar, rescuers like Shamus Horan and Rick Sanetti labored long past the point where smoke and heat should have driven
them away. To their horror, handfuls of hair and clothing were eventually all that could be extracted from the window openings. Sanetti describes one “very young man” who crawled to a window and reached up with a hand blackened from the heat. When the would-be helper reached for that hand, its skin came off and the victim’s red-hot wristwatch branded Sanetti’s palm. The young man was beyond saving.

Besides the three
HJY
interns on hand at The Station that night, there was a fourth Rhode Island College senior present, who by happenstance also majored in communications. Unlike the
HJY
crew, however, Jen Choquette wasn’t on an unpaid internship; she was at one of her multiple part-time jobs — bartending at The Station — which she worked to put herself through school. Jen had answered a want ad in the
Providence Journal
about a year and a half earlier. The interview and training process consisted of a backroom chat with Mike and Jeff Derderian at the club. No paperwork was completed — no employment application, no W-2. She’d be strictly paid “under the table . . . cash.” Training consisted of, “Here’s the bar, here’s the kitchen, here are the light switches and here’s the Fry-O-Lator oil.” She was never shown a fire extinguisher.

Choquette was soon opening the club on Thursdays and Saturdays at 4:30 p.m., closing it at 1 a.m., and cleaning up until 1:30. She would go directly from her college classes to the club on Thursday afternoon. For her labors, Jen received $40 cash per night, plus pooled bar tips. Tips had to be split with the “bar back,” who continuously stocked the bar’s coolers with beer and ice.

On the afternoon of the concert, Jen Choquette arrived at the club around quarter to four from a short day at school. She’d had “two huge exams that day,” had stayed up all night to prepare for them, and hadn’t eaten. Choquette was asleep on her feet from the moment she arrived. And from early on, she was slammed. At five feet, two inches tall, Jen could see only the first row of people against the bar, but she knew that the faster she made drinks, the more money she’d make. As soon as she’d serve one patron, another would take his place; and on it went. Sleep-deprived and food-starved, Choquette functioned on autopilot right up until Great White’s pyro lit up the club.

As Dr. Metal stood onstage hawking Budweiser,
WHJY
, and Great White, Jeff Derderian stood at the main bar alongside Choquette, counting out singles from the tip jar to replenish the cash registers, which were jammed with twenty-dollar bills. Derderian counted out twenties, put them in his pocket, or took them back to the office. This was the first time in Jen Choquette’s
experience that the registers overflowed with twenties. It was a good thing, too, because Dan Biechele, Great White’s manager, was waiting to be paid.

Jen was still head down, making drinks, when Great White began to play. She was so tired that when people shouted “Fire!” she heard “Fight!” and kept on pouring, figuring the safest spot for her was behind the bar. Only after she saw flames near the ceiling of the far end of the club did she stop her work, marveling that the band played on. When Great White finally stopped playing, smoke had begun to reach the bar, and a crescendo of screams followed. Her mind raced. “I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I can’t leave the bar. I’m gonna get fired. I have money in here. I can’t leave it.’ I probably had, like, $600 so far in the pot.”

But as smoke and flame spread through the concert hall, Choquette’s sounder instincts took over. Placing one hand on the bar, she vaulted over it and bolted out the bar exit door in a single motion. Looking back on that instant, Jen recalls that “something lifted me up over the bar and threw me out the side door.” The absence of alternatives can have an immediate clearing effect on the mind. It certainly did so for Jen Choquette. Fortunately, at that moment she knew where the bar door was located.