Several survivors who escaped the crush of the front doorway described a particularly terrifying phenomenon. Just as they began to make progress toward freedom, they felt themselves being “pulled back” into the suffocating scrum by people behind them desperate for any handhold or leverage. Similarly, anyone climbing over the stack effectively propelled others beneath him backward. With death licking at their backs, it was every person for him — or herself.
Erin Pucino was still trapped in the pileup. She lost contact with her friend Laurie Hussey in the smoky blackness, then found herself wedged in the pile with a man beneath her and several on top of her. Her arms, shoulders, and head extended from the front doors. Erin could breathe, but she could not escape.
Several people pulled on her arms, but her torso remained pinned. One man attempted to distance himself from the smoke and blistering heat (and, perhaps as well, from desperately grasping hands) by removing his jacket and offering it to her at arm’s length. It was no help. The same man was, however, able to free his girlfriend from beside Erin. But Pucino remained trapped, both legs wedged tightly as if in a giant vise.
With smoke billowing over the top of the human pyramid, Pucino finally wriggled one leg free, then the other, until rescuers’ traction on her arms pulled her free of her co-prisoners. Her legs completely numb from the crush, Erin dragged herself down the club’s concrete steps, then pulled herself to her useless feet by grabbing a car bumper. As she turned back toward the front doorway, where seconds earlier she had been captive, Pucino saw it completely engulfed in flames, silhouettes writhing within.
Late-arriving Gina Gauvin had made it as far as the front doors when she was carried over the crest of the toppling human wave, then trapped with her head and arms outside the pileup. Rendered unconsciousness by smoke, she never felt the flames consuming the flesh of her scalp, torso, and arms. Rather, her next conscious sensation was cold water from a fire hose, pounding her face. Revived by the water, Gauvin kept yelling that she was alive. But the firemen were unable to pull her loose before removing several people from on top of her. Once they freed her from the stack, firemen lay her on the ground and hosed her down in the 20-degree cold. She would eventually emerge from a medically induced coma six weeks later, having been treated for third- and fourth-degree burns over 60 percent of her body.
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 CDs. 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 i
nside 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.
The Pickett audiotape continues for another ten minutes. Its contents are probably worse than most of us would care to imagine. As fire science suggests, many victims were instantly rendered unconscious by smoke, and thereby spared suffering. However, Matthew Pickett’s audiotape also teaches that pain and despair do not discriminate by sex, and pleas to be rescued by God or man may go unheard. In the end, its only sounds are the crackle, hiss, and pop of flames, indistinguishable from those of logs in a fireplace — sounds that in a different setting can be so comforting, but are here so profoundly disturbing.
Sadly, comparison of Joe Cristina’s “last photo,” Matthew Pickett’s audiotape, and Brian Butler’s videotape confirms that Jeff Rader missed a brief opportunity to escape through the band door after his picture was taken. Using Jack Russell’s “that’s not good” declaration as a synchronization mark on both the Pickett and Butler tapes, patrons can be seen exiting through the stage door on the Butler video at least ten seconds after Matthew Pickett yelled, “Joe! Joe! Take a picture.” Had Rader wheeled to his left and run
out the band door immediately after Joe Cristina snapped his picture, he may have escaped along with those other persons. But that would have required running toward the flames — and away from Becky Shaw.
Disaster sociologist Lee Clarke notes that “people die the same way they live, with friends, loved ones, and colleagues — in communities. When danger arises, the rule — as in normal situations — is for people to help those next to them before they help themselves.” There is a strong tendency among individual victims to seek out friends or family and to do what those others are doing, despite what more reasoned analysis might suggest for the individual. Faced with unfamiliar life-threatening situations, humans appear to embrace groupthink and loved ones, often to their individual detriment. This phenomenon may have played a role in Rader’s, and other victims’, fates that night.
While Matthew Pickett’s recorder was memorializing sounds inside The Station, Brian Butler’s video camera continued to record the scene outside the building. As Butler clears the front doors, a woman on the tape keens, “Where’s my husband? Where’s my husband?”
Butler’s camera remains on as he squeezes past the atrium windows, through the narrow corridor left by Great White’s bus, which was parked parallel to them. At the building’s northwest corner, Butler’s lens captures a cluster of band members and patrons standing outside the stage door, gazing, stunned, at flames already roaring through the roof of the drummer’s alcove. Less than twenty seconds after his own exit, Butler circles back toward the front door. On his tape, a goateed man with glasses tumbles out a broken atrium window and sprints away. Black smoke belches from the window behind him as if pumped under pressure.
Killer Show Page 15