Free Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire by John Barylick

noticed a news van from Channel 12 TV turning toward the club — and then he remembered that Jeff Derderian was a reporter for that station.
    Jason Lund, twenty-six, was in the thick of The Station crowd pressed to the front of the stage, anxiously awaiting Great White’s appearance. His wifewas expecting their third child, and he hadn’t felt right going to the show alone. But she had persuaded him to go and have a good time with his friends. When his cell phone rang, Lund barely heard it over The Station’s din, so he elbowed his way to the men’s room to talk. It was his wife. She was having contractions. He’d better get home. Lund immediately left to join her, but by the time he got home, the contractions had diminished to a false labor. “Too bad,” he thought.
    As of 10:30, all the people on Jack Russell’s guest list had arrived at The Station: the housekeepers from the Fairfield Inn, the construction crew from Denny’s, the two college DJ s, and everyone from the Doors of Perception tattoo parlor. But at 10:55 Patty Sanetti left to go home. Her job required her to activate a computer program at 11 p.m., “but she’d be back,” she assured her husband and niece. She’d miss the beginning of Great White’s set, but what could she do?
    Everyone else on the guest list remained at the club, in a state of high anticipation. Right up until 11 p.m., when Great White struck the opening chords of “Desert Moon,” each would consider it to be the very luckiest of days.

CHAPTER 7

    YOURS, IN FIRE SAFETY …
    AS THE HOUR APPROACHED FOR GREAT WHITE to go on, Mike and Sandy Hoogasian huddled together facing the stage, feeling the crush and the excitement of the crowd. They tried to take in the whole scene, but the sheer number of bodies, shoulder to shoulder and back to belly, made appreciation of anyone beyond a six-foot radius impossible. Mike thought back to his bachelor party at The Station two years earlier, when his firefighter brother-in-law had asked him, “You hang out in this firetrap?” and wondered about the room’s legal occupancy. Every other restaurant or club he’d been in had a sign prominently displaying the maximum occupancy. But Hoogasian saw none here.
    Perhaps the reason no maximum occupancy was posted at The Station was that legal capacity there was a fluid concept, depending upon when the calculation was performed and who performed it. The last person to undertake that calculus, Denis Larocque, did so as part of the club’s transfer of ownership from Howard Julian to the Derderians. To call Larocque’s methodology creative would be putting a most benign gloss on it.
    In Rhode Island, local fire inspections are carried out by a member of each town’s fire department who has been appointed a deputy state fire marshal. In West Warwick in the late 1990s that responsibility fell to Denis Larocque. Larocque was responsible for enforcing the state fire code, which specified, among other things, how legal occupancies were to be calculated for restaurants and nightclubs. Having lived his entire life in West Warwick, Larocque was more than familiar with every street and building in town.
    Larocque had graduated from West Warwick High School, where he played on the Wizards football team. His father, a son of French Canadian mill workers, toiled for years as a second-shift grinder at Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. Young Denis would not follow in those footsteps. Rather, when he was twenty-one, Larocque joined West Warwick’s close-knit fire department, where he rose steadily through the ranks. He marrieda local girl, had three children, and settled in the Arctic Hill neighborhood, just blocks from where he’d been raised — only this time, Larocque lived in the neighborhood’s largest house, with a pool in the backyard. In addition to his home, he owned a dozen apartments in town, an industrial park unit in nearby Warwick, and an undeveloped house lot in a desirable