Each officer ‘wore the 1,000-yard stare of horror.’
By Tom Mooney, Providence Journal
WEST WARWICK, R.I. -- Patrolman Stephen Vannini walked through the front doors of The Station nightclub, envious of his friend.
“You’re lucky,” he said over the music to Patrolman Anthony Bettencourt. “This is an easy detail for you.”
Bettencourt, a rugged young cop with a crewcut and cleft chin, stood by the cash register. Andrea Mancini, who checked tickets and IDs, knew all the officers by name and she greeted Vannini cheerfully.
“It’s not bad,” Bettencourt said, smirking. “You get to hear some good music and get paid for it.”
Indeed it had been the luck of the draw that had won Bettencourt the overtime duty, working crowd control. And overtime at the club beat directing traffic or a night on the dispatch desk.
The Station wasn’t like Mardi Gras’s, in Cranston, which could draw a thousand people and keep several officers busy. The Station attracted a few hundred, usually happy customers. And on this night, Feb. 20., Bettencourt shared in the excitement: he’d get to hear Great White, the 80s heavy metal band he and Vannini had heard much about.
Bettencourt checked his watch. It was just after 10:30 p.m. Neon beer signs glowed on the walls of the low-ceilinged club. Clutches of people joked with bar maids around the brightly lit bar. At the other end of the club, flashing stage lights bathed a warm-up band in blues and reds. Listeners held cups and bottles of beer and swayed to the music. Great White would take the stage in a half-hour.
About 90 minutes earlier, Vannini and Patrolman Mark Knott had stopped by on their separate patrols to let Bettencourt know they’d be around if needed. A woman had rushed up to Vannini carrying a sick puppy. She had found the little beagle along the side street. She raised it up to Officer Vannini, who stood 6 feet, 3 inches. Would he take care of it?
On the way to the pound the puppy threw up on Vannini’s back seat.
Vannini didn’t complain about the dog incident now as he joined Bettencourt and Knott again. Before Great White went on, Bettencourt wanted the two officers’ help with a “walk-through” -- a friendly showing of force to encourage good behavior.
The three officers made up an able trio. All were members of the department’s SWAT team. At 33, Knott was two years older than the other patrolmen and resembled Tom Hanks in his thin years. He held degrees in finance, insurance and criminal justice, had graduated first in his class of police cadets in 1995, and had trained as a hostage negotiator.
On Vannini’s first day of work, Dec. 23, 1995, fire had burned through an apartment killing five people, including three young boys. It had also been his worst day, and until then, the town’s worst fire.
But in a few minutes there would be another fire.
It would race at incomprehensible speed, spreading carnage where moments earlier there had been joy.
And for a few critical minutes, before scores of firefighters would arrive, these men and other West Warwick police officers would struggle to save lives at the open gates of hell.
AS Bettencourt prepared for the night’s walk-through, Knott reached across his black jacket for his radio earpiece and tucked it in place. Now he could hear dispatch over the clamor.
He surveyed the crowd. His friend Dennis Diamonte sat off to the side where pool tables had been pushed against the atrium windows to make more room.
Knott thought to go say hello when he heard the dispatcher’s voice in his ear: Report of a domestic dispute on River Street, a quick shot up Route 2. The dispatcher ordered Patrolman Jason Senerchia, out on patrol, and Vannini, to the scene.
It was 10:58 p.m.
What luck, Vannini thought. First the sick dog and now he’d miss Great White’s opening. He turned and headed for the door, throwing a quick, goodbye to Andrea Mancini.
Vannini reached the River Street apartment about three minutes later. The apartment door had been torn off. Senerchia was finishing his interview with a woman. The man was safely out of the apartment. All that remained was taking pictures of the scene.
Vannini knew Knott, back at The Station, carried a digital camera in his cruiser. He would call on his radio for it.
It was now about 11:05 p.m.
BACK INSIDE the club, members of Great White took the stage before an exuberant crowd hoisting bottles of beer. They slung on guitars and the drummer took his place behind his base. Around them, charcoal-colored packing foam covered the walls for soundproofing.
Bettencourt decided to postpone the walk-through until Vannini returned. Then Knott heard the request for his camera.
He turned away from the stage noise to respond. Under flashing red lights, Great White launched into the first bars of “Desert Moon,” followed by a burst of pyrotechnics.
Thick showers of sparks shot out from canisters in front of the drummer, forming a brilliant three-pronged spear. The sparks showered the side walls, landing in the crevices and lumps of the egg-crate foam.
“The crowd just went crazy with it,” Bettencourt said.
Then the foam ignited.
Had a television cameraman in the club not captured the fire on tape, Bettencourt is sure no one would ever believe how fast it spread -- running up the walls and across the ceiling like a lit fuse.
At first, some in the crowd thought the flames were part of the act. But within 20 seconds many had turned away from the stage and were jabbing their fingers in the air, pointing toward the exits.
Bettencourt reached for his radio, clipped above his left shoulder: “62,” he said, giving the dispatcher his badge number. “Start the Fire Department. The Station’s on fire.”
It was 11:07 p.m.
Tony Bettencourt is known by his peers for his composure in tense situations. Two summers ago, he crouched behind a small shield with another SWAT team member and approached a distraught man pointing a gun alternately at them and himself. Bettencourt and his partner pulled two people away from the gunman, who eventually dropped the pistol.
But the officers who heard him call for the Fire Department, heard something unfamiliar in his voice: distress.
At the River Street apartment, Vannini turned to Senerchia. “Did he just say call the Fire Department?”
It seemed impossible. Vannini had just been there.
Maybe an amplifier was smoking, reasoned Senerchia. Or maybe someone spilled a beer into a speaker.
Even Knott, who hadn’t yet left the club to deliver the camera, wasn’t immediately worried. But he had his back to the unleashed fire, sweeping across the ceiling. Standing just inside the club’s entry way, he called into dispatch: standing by if needed.
Seconds later a wave of panicked people smashed into Knott by the vestibule doors.
“Don’t push!” someone screamed. “Don’t push.”
But they all kept pushing, carrying Knott outside and flipping him backward over a metal railing. He landed on a car hood.
Bettencourt was several feet behind him. The force of the mob carried him past his post by the cash register and pinned his face against a wall just inside of the vestibule doors.
He reached for his radio again:
“Expedite the Fire Department!”
At police headquarters, Capt. Gregory Johnson, the shift commander, had walked into the dispatcher’s office when he heard Bettencourt’s initial call for firefighters. Now, as Bettencourt radioed again to hurry the fire trucks, Johnson heard screams over the club’s piercing fire alarm.
Knott transmitted a one-word message seconds later, summing up the scene: “Stampede.”
Johnson ordered all units respond with lights and sirens as fast as possible. He turned out a mutual aid call to the state’s police departments. A separate, similar appeal for firefighters would soon follow.
Initial estimates placed the crowd inside The Station at about 360.
Governor Carcieri would say the next morning that those who hadn’t begun to flee within 30 seconds after the fire started, had little chance of making it out.
THE CONCERTGOERS had all entered through the front door and now many, too many, headed out the same way. They formed a bottleneck that squeezed Bettencourt into the doorways.
The door frame pressed into him. He felt the radio on his shoulder snag. Then the logjam of human bodies popped free. Outside, Bettencourt felt for his radio again. It had been ripped off.
The Station was framed in wood some 50 years ago and over time had undergone a jumble of makeshift renovations.
From the front, round atrium windows protruded to the right of the entrance, giving that half of the club a contemporary look. On the opposite side of the front door were three large cottage windows with the middle window twice as wide as the others. A steep gambrel-like roof of asphalt shingles loomed over the front like a heavy brow.
Knott looked up from the car hood he had landed on. Men and women poured from the front door, rushing down the handicap ramp to the left and descending the four concrete steps to the right.
Less than a minute had passed since the fire started.
Knott heard people screaming and kicking at the atrium windows a few feet away from him. With one strike of his baton he smashed the nearest window and ran the baton around the edges dislodging clinging shards, clearing a hole about 2 1/2-feet square.
The first few people out clutched Knott’s hand and jumped the 4 feet to the pavement. The next several spilled out, coughing and gagging.
Toxic smoke seeped -- then gushed -- from the broken window. The black plume thickened so fast that Knott lost sight of people only inches inside the frame.
An arm or a leg would appear. Knott would snare it and pull a person out.
As the seconds passed, fewer people came out. Knott turned his head away from the smoke, reached in through the window and felt along the tile floor. The last three or four people he grabbed were unconscious.
Then there was no one.
“The last thing I pulled out of there was a bar stool.”
THE STAMPEDE had shoved Bettencourt out of the club and in the opposite direction of Knott. He found himself on the handicap ramp below the three windows.
Feet kicked desperately at the glass. Some broke through and bodies dove out while Bettencourt was still clearing the panes with his baton. Several concertgoers who had escaped joined him at the windows and pulled others out. The building sucked in shafts of fresh air, fueling the speeding flames. Thick, gray smoke belched out, obscuring any life beyond.
“Come to the window,” Bettencourt screamed. “Come to the window.” One man did, running full speed.
He crashed through the window panes, sending pieces of glass every where. “He opened up a nice hole,” Bettencourt said.
He fell to the pavement with a long, bloody gash in his arm. “I couldn’t tell you who he was or what happened to him afterwards.”
Shrieks for help grew loud now at the front entrance, drawing both Bettencourt and Knott. About 20 people were piled on top of each other, flailing their arms and pleading for their lives.
Over their screams Knott heard the strengthening fire roar and wood crack, as if a furnace door had flung open.
The officers focused first on those being crushed at the bottom of the pile -- and whose hands clung to their ankles and pant cuffs.
But they had as much chance of freeing them as they would dislodging logs from the bottom of a cord stack.
The officers gave up and grabbed from the top where people were less tightly wedged. Still, it was nearly impossible to free anyone.
Bettencourt noticed that some could almost reach the railing that ran along the outer edge of the steps and continued down the handicap ramp. A long Budweiser banner had been tied along it.
He climbed down the steps to untie it. Perhaps, he thought, if those snared in the doorway could inch their way to the railing, they could use the leverage to dislodge themselves.
The banner knots came hard. He pulled and pulled before they finally released. Then Bettencourt stood seemingly powerless at the bottom of the steps, looking up at those trapped, unsure what to do next.
Mayhem and death had befallen them so quickly.
“It was impossible, basically,” said Bettencourt. “Those people were so wedged in it was incredible. I had never seen anything like that in my life. At that point I knew it was going to be bad.”
Bettencourt returned to the windows to the left, where a few people were still getting out.
Knott remained at the main door where he had had some luck a minute earlier dragging people away.
“They grabbed at my ankles and cuffs and every time you went back it was the same thing,” he said. “If there is one vision to haunt me, that’s it.”
The backs, shoulders and arms of those on top of the pile began smoking. Knott wasn’t sure why. Had the fire grown so fast that flames were now reaching them? Or had they come from deeper inside the inferno and jumped onto the pile?
Part of the answer dripped onto his bare wrist between his coat cuff and his glove: a hot glob of melted asphalt shingle.
Fire experts estimate the temperature inside The Station reached 400 degrees within 60 seconds.
In minutes it surpassed 1,000 degrees, twisting some of the building’s steel supports like licorice sticks.
DETECTIVES Gary Appolonia and Brian Araujo were returning from Coventry after interviewing a robbery suspect when they heard Bettencourt’s call for the Fire Department. Now as they came speeding over a hill on Cowesett Avenue, they could see black smoke billowing over the club and the road.
“This isn’t going to be good,” said Appolonia.
“I know,” Araujo responded.
At the club’s front entrance, Knott drew hope from the sirens wailing from every direction.
Once the firefighters arrive, you’ll be be OK, he told himself. Everyone’s going to be OK.
IT WAS ABOUT 11:10 p.m. The fire had been burning for roughly three minutes. The two detectives stared at the scene beyond their windshield. People ran through their headlight beams, burned flesh hanging from their limbs. Others collapsed into snowbanks.
In the orange glow, Araujo and Appolonia saw Knott and Bettencourt and Patrolman Sean Duffy. Appolonia ran left to help. Araujo went right.
Araujo hadn’t gone 10 steps when he came upon a woman. “My boyfriend is in there!” she screamed, before collapsing. Araujo kept moving; people were on fire and running from the club, consumed by flames.
“We can’t get in there,” he told himself.
Appolonia nearly tripped over a petite young woman curled up by the roadside. Two startling white eyes peered up from a blackened head.
“I can’t move my upper body,” she said.
As Appolonia crouched to help her, he saw a big man coming toward them. The man would have trampled them both had he not fallen a few feet away, his face and hands burned.
“Stick your arms in the snowbanks!” Appolonia told him. The heat rose with each step closer to the club.
Appolonia found one man bent over a car, his face “cooking.”
“Help me help you,” Appolonia yelled at him, dragging him back toward The Station’s sign by the road.
The last person Bettencourt grabbed at the windows was unrecognizable. Then two eyes opened wide and white.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “I have kids.”
BY 11:12 P.M., about five minutes after the fire began, Officers Vannini and Senerchia returned from River Street, arriving with the first West Warwick firefighters.
Bettencourt helped a firefighter stretch a hose toward the club. It snagged beneath the tires of parked cars. And then, no water.
“Turn the hose on!” someone in the parking lot screamed.
When finally water came, there was little pressure.
Car tires melted and exploded.
Vannini ran from his cruiser shouting: “Roll in the snow, roll in the snow.” He grabbed a fire extinguisher off a truck and pointed the nozzle at a badly burned victim.
The jet of water came out too hard. It tore the burned skin from his body. Vannini powdered him with snow.
Looking around, Vannini caught sight of Bettencourt, Knott and Duffy. “Each wore the 1,000-yard stare of horror.”
PATROLMAN SENERCHIA turned to the woman yelling for her boyfriend. “Just let her go,” Araujo shouted back at him.
“That’s when I realized just how bad this would be,” Senerchia said. “There were just so many others.”
Jason Senerchia, grew up in the Pawtuxet Valley and worked as a mechanic after high school. But he had always wanted to be a cop and counted with pride his days in uniform. Tonight -- two years, ten months, thirty days since he had been sworn in -- he crawled on hands and knees under a blow torch of searing heat.
As he approached the club, he tried not to think of his friend Christopher Arruda. They had been like brothers since first grade. Earlier in the week, each had helped the other shovel their driveways and Arruda had invited Senerchia to the Great White concert.
The Station was Arruda’s second home; he had his own virtual parking spot next door in the Nissan dealership lot. Senerchia hadn’t had a chance yet to look for his green Ford Ranger.
By the stage exit door, Senerchia found a man he assumed was a member of Great White calling out to someone. Senerchia grabbed him and pushed him away from the building.
Eventually he looked over to the Nissan lot.
As he feared. Arruda’s truck.
AT THE COWESETT INN across the street, Capt. Johnson worked the triage center. He was worried about his men and got on the radio to raise them. He tried Bettencourt first:
“C-11 to 62 . . . C-11 to 62.”
Bettencourt did not answer; he couldn’t. His radio was shot. “C-11 to 62.”
Knott heard the call and looked around the parking lot and did a quick accounting. Yes, there was Bettencourt and all the other officers. No one was seriously injured. He keyed his radio:
“We’re all here.”
EPILOGUE
Patrolman Jason Senerchia learned the fate of his friend the next morning. A friend called while he was still at the fire. She couldn’t reach Christopher. “That’s when it hit me that he had definitely been inside.” Coroners identified Arruda’s body three days later.
“We did the best we could,” Senerchia says.
Patrolman Stephen Vannini avoided his usual gym for a week. He couldn’t face an employee whose sister was among the 99 killed.
Vannini doesn’t remember hearing a single scream during the fire. “I hear them now.”
Patrolman Anthony Bettencourt and Detectives Appolonia and Araujo long for the day when the fire site is plowed under. They drive by the blackened corner too often; West Warwick is only 8 square miles.
Perhaps once it’s gone, their memories will recede, though Bettencourt has his doubts. Not only did he struggle with the pile of bodies at the door, he saw the second stack just behind it.
Patrolman Mark Knott, who made it out of The Station without injury, hurt his foot a week later jumping over a fence after a burglary. He was out of work for a month.
He reported back to headquarters at midnight on April 1. His duty for the next eight hours: guard the remains of The Station.
There was no moon that night. A damp, burnt smell lingered. Knott walked carefully across glass and bits of burned wood, toward the four concrete steps. As he climbed up what was once the front entrance, he relived the night: the smashed windows, the trapped bodies, the reaching arms.
At the top step he stopped, feeling as if he were standing alone on a blackened stage, struck by how flat and quiet and ever so small it all seemed now. Amazingly small to have once held so much life.
Look back at previous coverage of The Station fire disaster, visit a memorial to its victims, find related documents, video and more at: http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/