Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (32 page)

Linda Fisher, at home six years after the fire. (AP photo)

Memorials at the Station site.
Note Barry Warner’s house in right rear.
(Photo, John Barylick)

Not all of
FAR
’
S
work could be accomplished with tweezers and brushes. One day, a mechanical loader/grabber was called in to move mounds of debris so that further floor areas could be excavated. Brown student Zach Woodford stood shivering alongside Richard Gould, watching as loose material dribbled from the loader’s claw, on the off chance that it might contain artifacts. When a gold chain glinted from the refuse, Woodford signaled for the loader operator to stop.

It was the necklace they had been asked to look for by the grieving family. Repatriation of that artifact alone was proof to the
FAR
team that its work had not been in vain.

CHAPTER 22

CIRCLING THE WAGONS

We had permission to use the pyro.

— Jack Russell, while the fire still raged

At no time did I or my brother authorize or
OK
the use of pyro by the band Great White.

— Jeffrey Derderian, five hours after the fire

Our inspector missed nothing. They were in compliance.

— West Warwick fire chief Charles Hall, seven days after the fire

Our officials were doing their customary public duty in a conscientious way.

— West Warwick town manager Wolfgang Bauer, one month after the fire

IT’S A GENERALLY ACCEPTED NOTION IN THE LAW
that statements made by witnesses contemporaneous with a critical event tend to be more trustworthy than accounts rendered long after the fact. For this reason, court rules are loosened to allow into evidence hearsay recitations of “excited utterances” made out of court in the heat of a critical moment. On the other hand, time for research and reflection can sometimes contribute to the accuracy of witness accounts.

For potential criminal and civil defendants in the Station nightclub fire, however, neither phenomenon would obtain. Most immediately lawyered up, clammed up, or, more commonly, gave patently false or misleading statements in their haste to deflect blame. In the minutes, days, and weeks following the tragedy, one after another of the responsible parties went public with everything from selective truths to the big lie. At their most benign, these dubious pronouncements merely demonstrated people’s innate capacity for deception when threatened. At their worst, they were pitiful insults to the memory of Station fire victims.

The commonsense question on the lips of everyone who saw video of
Great White’s abortive performance at The Station was, “How could anyone set off fireworks in that firetrap?” To the average layman, the issue boiled down to whether Great White had permission from the club to do so. (Not that permission would have made the use of pyro without required permit and licensed pyrotechnician legal, but it was an easy starting point in casting blame.) Dan Biechele and Jack Russell said, “Yes, the band had permission”; the Derderians, emphatically, “No.”

One of the facts supporting Biechele’s position was that his computerized “advance sheet” for the concert, prepared after consultation with Mike Derderian a week before the show and seized by investigators immediately after the fire, read, “Pyro: Yes,” suggesting that permission had been given. Additionally, in earlier venues on the tour like Shark City in Illinois and Ovation in Florida, where permission for pyro had been denied, Great White did not use it.

Even more telling were arrangements for Great White’s scheduled appearance three days
after
The Station. It was to be at a venue in Hartford, Connecticut, called the Webster Theater. Dan Biechele had hired a videographer, John Lynch, to tape Great White’s performance there. When Lynch attended the Station concert to prep for his shoot by watching Great White’s show, Biechele told him that the Webster Theater performance would be identical to the show at The Station, “but they were not going to be using pyrotechnics because they didn’t receive permission to do so.” Lynch, who was more or less “with the band,” escaped uninjured from The Station through the band door.

Did Great White simply slip its pyrotechnics past the Station management, who would have denied permission if asked? The answer probably lay in the history of prior pyro use at the club. On that point, Jeffrey Derderian could not have been clearer. Five hours after the fire, he sat slumped in a back booth of the Cowesett Inn. Opposite him were Rhode Island assistant attorney general Randy White and West Warwick detective George Winman. Across the street, the horrific process of removing charred bodies from his nightclub was well under way.

White asked Derderian several questions about whether pyrotechnics had been used by various bands at The Station. The club owner’s answer was that it never happened. The prosecutor described sparklers, flashpots, and “devices that deploy open flames of any kind.” But Derderian stood fast. They were never used. The club owner extemporized, adding that when Great White played The Station in 2000, Jack Russell asked for permission to use pyrotechnics, but it was denied. (Unknown to Derderian, Great White had never used pyrotechnics on any tour before December 2002.) No matter that W.A.S.P., under the road management of Dan Biechele,
had fired off Blackie Lawless’s codpiece gerb at The Station in 2000. Similarly, the fact that Holy Diver had used flashpots; Lovin’ Kry, Hotter Than Hell, and Human Clay had all used gerbs; Dirty Deeds, homemade gunpowder-fueled flashpots; and 10/31 used butane fire-breathing — all on multiple occasions — must have slipped Derderian’s memory in the excitement of the moment.

Two days later, prosecutors asked the same questions of club manager Kevin Beese, and his story echoed Derderian’s. “I’ve had bands ask about doing pyro, and the answer is always no,” explained Beese. “You know, we don’t do pyro. We don’t do fire. We don’t do bombs.”

On the other hand, Beese cautioned that he just might not have seen everything that went on in his single-story, four-thousand-square-foot club: “There’s a lot of times I might be in the basement getting a beer or changing a keg. I might, you know, I might be in the back grabbing a bottle out of a closet, you know what I mean?” And, as for pyrotechnics themselves, Beese pleaded ignorance: “I’m not too familiar with any pyros or anything like that. . . . You’re talking Portuguese to me when you’re talking about pyros and stuff like that.” Whatever Beese had learned from Frank Davidson’s demonstration of twelve-and ten-foot gerbs at The Station, in advance of Human Clay’s appearance there, had apparently been displaced by more pressing concerns.

Frank “Grimace” Davidson, who had illegally shot pyro at The Station for Human Clay multiple times, heard from news reports about Jeff Derderian’s post-fire denial of prior pyro there and was having none of it. When he shot
his
pyro at the club, Davidson at least brought Scott Gorman along, with fire extinguisher at the ready. And Davidson just knew too many people who had died in the fire.

So, Davidson told his whole history to the police — how he’d liberated gerbs from his prior Florida pyrotechnics job; how he’d demonstrated them for Beese and Stone; how he’d shot pyro twice at The Station for Human Clay; how Beese sought to hire him to do it for the club on a regular basis; how he was scheduled to shoot pyro for a video at The Station that very week; and how he’d spoken by cell phone with Scooter Stone while the fire still burned. Armed with this information, prosecutors reinterviewed Beese three days after his first statement.

In his second statement, Beese admitted that some bands’ use of pyro at The Station might have escaped his notice: “I mean, it’s quite possible if they did have some kind of display like that, I might have missed it. I might have been in the back. I could have been on the phone. I could have been booking
bands, you know what I mean? . . . I’m not saying that there hasn’t been a band that’s come in and slid it by us. . . . But like I said, I’m in and out of the back room, I’m in and out of the cooler, you know what I mean?”

As to whether he knew anyone named Frank Davidson, however, Beese was immovable: “I really have no idea who he is.” “Nobody’s ever demonstrated any kind of pyrotechnic thing for me,” he added. Asked if he ever tried to hire a “Frank Davidson” to shoot pyro, Beese flatly denied it. “The name doesn’t even ring a bell,” declared Beese. Further inquiry would reveal at least this final denial to be truthful.

In his statements to investigators, Frank Davidson also mentioned Paul Vanner, The Station’s soundman, as someone familiar with prior pyro at the club. He claimed to have known Vanner since high school. Police followed up that lead with Vanner himself. In a statement given four days after the fire, Vanner admitted that a
KISS
tribute band and Dirty Deeds had previously used pyro at The Station. But, as to knowing anybody named Frank Davidson, well, he was as adamant as Beese: “I don’t know any Frank Davidson.”

Davidson’s story simply did not check out.

Every public tragedy has its share of wannabe witnesses, and the Station fire was no exception. One woman gave police a detailed, increasingly fantastic account of how she escaped the fire, when she was actually participating in a community theater rehearsal of
A Chorus Line
in Massachusetts that night. Could it be that Frank Davidson was just another wacko with a vivid imagination, looking for his fifteen minutes of fame?

Reporters and the public wanted answers from the town of West Warwick, too. How could a club with highly flammable foam on its walls pass fire inspections? Was the club overcrowded that night? Just what
was
the club’s permitted capacity?

Some answers would be long in coming. Some would never be given. As to the club’s legally permitted occupancy, no one seemed to know. On the day after the fire, West Warwick fire chief Charles Hall told a reporter for the
Providence Journal
that The Station’s permitted occupancy was “300.” (He was only off by 104.) He “strongly denied” to reporters for the
Boston Herald
that there had been more than 300 patrons in the club at the time of the fire. (Confirmatory interviews and body counts after the fire showed that this statement by Hall was low by a mere 162.) The man who had increased the club’s capacity from 253 to 317 in December 1999, then to 404 only three months later, West Warwick fire marshal Denis
Larocque, had no public comment after the fire. In a taped police interview, however, he was asked, “Do you know if you’ve had any complaints from citizens directly to the fire department or to yourself regarding overcrowding there?” Larocque answered, “Um . . . we haven’t had any complaints, um, that I can recall about any overcrowding or any type of complaints, complaints of that nature.”

Perhaps Larocque forgot that on November 15, 1999, acting West Warwick police chief Gerald Tellier wrote to the fire chief at the time, Peter Brousseau, stating “there have been a number of complaints about the Filling Station located on Cowesett Avenue. Could you please have your Fire Prevention Officer [Larocque] check that building and advise me as to the correct occupancy limit for the building?” It probably also slipped Larocque’s mind that he himself then wrote to the building’s owner, Triton Realty, on December 13, 1999, that “a complaint was received in this office concerning The Filling Station.” Perhaps Larocque had also forgotten that on February 18, 2000 —
one month before he increased the club’s capacity to 404 at the request of Michael Derderian
— his own boss, Fire Chief Richard Rita, had written to the West Warwick Town Council regarding The Station’s liquor license transfer to the Derderians: “Another issue that is of grave concern to me is an ongoing problem of overcrowding which occurs at this establishment. Occupancy limits are determined and are exceeded on busy nights. Again, this presents a problem should evacuation or emergency medical treatment become necessary.”