On Thursday, February 20, 2003 the lives of our 100 precious angels were lost at the Station Nightclub. At approximately 11:07 many lives were changed forever. The mission of The Station Fire Memorial Foundation is to ensure that our loved ones receive a proper memorial upon the sacred ground where their lives were so tragically cut short. We will remember 02-20-03.
1975 — February 20, 2003
Abbie L. Hoisington’s students say it the best. “She taught us about honesty, confidence, kindness and respect for one another and ourselves,” said one. “She cared about us and expected the best for us and never gave up on us,” said another.
Ms. Hoisington, 28, of Cranston, was a special-education teacher at Burrillville High School. Though she had been there less than a year, the talkative teacher — affectionately known as Gabby Abbie — had made many friends.
Abbie’s interest in special education began in high school when her teachers encouraged her to get involved with the Special Education Club, her family said. Soon after, she volunteered to work with the Special Olympics. Then she majored in special education at the University of Southern Connecticut.
But she didn’t teach just academics. She taught life skills. Abbie took her students grocery shopping and gave them cooking lessons. She took them bowling, and sailing on her parents’ boat. She and her students made soap and sold it to help raise money for classroom accessories, including a refrigerator they had hoped to buy.
She was a constant advocate for her students. “She was a pit bull for something she believed in,” said her mother, Bonnie A. Hoisington, of Cranston.
Abbie wasn’t a fan of Great White, the band playing at The Station the night of the fire. She went because her friend, Lisa D’Andrea, a special education teacher in Cranston, asked her to come, Mrs. Hoisington said. Lisa D’Andrea, 42, of Barrington, also died in the fire.
Abbie loved music and stepdancing. She collected everything: clothes, CDs, perfumes, and for some reason, pigs. Her family left a porcelain pig at the fire site in memory of her. But mostly, she lived for her students, her mother said.
One of her former pupils, Samuel “Sammy” F. Muskelly, 18, sang at her funeral. Sammy said Ms. Hoisington put up with his 13-year-old bad attitude and always kept him motivated when he was in her class at Hope Middle School in Providence. When he invited her to his plays or talent shows, she would always attend. “All the high notes that I can’t hit, I was hitting them because she came out there for me,” he said. Sammy still knows her telephone number by heart.
“She was like E.F. Hutton to me. When she talked, I listened,” he said. “I knew what she was telling me was the right way.”
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1984 — February 20, 2003
His fingers conjured magic from the neck of a guitar. Albert A. DiBonaventura, 18, could play on his knees, or swing the instrument behind his back and rip into a melody without seeing the strings. Six guitars hang on a wall in one room in his parents’ cream-colored house on Wheeler Street, North Dighton, Mass., where he lived. Music posters dot another room. Images of guitars are even part of the carpet design.
Albert was a guitarist with 18 Stars, a band that played at The Call and other Providence clubs. Lately, a band called Shryne was asking him to riff with them, says his brother, John “Patrick” Ring, 35, of Plymouth, Mass. But Albert dreamed of more. His was the rock ‘n’ roll fantasy: move to California and play gigs in Los Angeles clubs where the great ones paid their dues.
“To be a rock star — that’s what he wanted to do,” says his brother. “For as long as I can remember — as soon as he picked up a guitar.” He liked classic rock and the harder-edged music that followed. He would lay down a speed-is-king solo in the style of Eddie Van Halen. He would dig down deep and play the blues of Jonny Lang. And he appreciated the swing of Brian Setzer.
Albert attended Dighton-Rehoboth schools and planned to study computer graphic design at a college in California. Already he had used his computer-graphics skills to design the cover for his band’s CD. His brother recalled Albert’s love for baseball as he drove a visitor down the wooded back roads of Albert’s adolescence. “He was left-handed, so he was an unstoppable pitcher,” John Ring said.
He brought the car to a stop. Ahead was the ballfield where his brother, tall for an 11-year-old, sent a homer sailing impossibly far over the outfield. “He just crushed that ball,” John said. “I just see him standing at the plate.”
John shared something he has written about his brother since the fire: “I can only have faith that Albert is now in a better place, playing the music he loved for the heavens to hear.”
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1965 — February 20, 2003
Alfred Crisostomi — “Cousin Freddy” to his friends — was the man to see if you wanted to talk sports or music, or better yet, go to the game or the concert and have a time to remember. He was a young 38, with enough positive energy and enthusiasm to not only keep up with but lead a group of friends and cousins more than a decade younger.
He kept in touch with them all via cell phone, announcing his plans on the fly. He was on his way to a good time in his Ford Explorer — who could get away and meet him there? He electrified and lit up the room,” his cousin Brian Valcourt said. “He’d always hug you and say, ‘Great to see you!’ He showed everybody the utmost respect.” “We didn’t think of him as a 38-year-old cousin,” Brian said. “He was like a brother and a best friend.”
But kind feelings never stopped him from destroying his challengers at any game going: tennis, darts, cards, pool. On Sunday, the day of rest, Freddy would go only so far as to stop moving. At his home on Haswill Street, in Warwick, he commanded his satellite-powered big-screen TV, remote in one hand, cell phone in the other, calling every local-team fan he knew to glory in the victories of his all-New York heroes — Yankees, Jets, Islanders.
Whenever New York lost, naturally, he’d duck the return torment by not answering the phone. “It was highly competitive,” his friend K.C. Jarest said. “His teams always had to be Number 1.” His friends remember how much Freddy loved his children, Nicole, 15, and Brandon, 10, and his girlfriend, Gina Russo of Cranston, who was with him at The Station and remains critically injured.
His friend, Alivia Sarno, said the couple met on the Internet and had mutual interests in sports and music. “You couldn’t see him with anyone else,” she said. Rene Valcourt, a cousin, often teased Freddy about his slowness in proposing marriage to Gina. “He’d say, ‘I’m too young! — but pretty soon. She’s the one.’
Freddy’s friend Bill Marcello said, “The last year of Freddy’s life was probably the best, the most successful, the happiest I’d ever seen him.” Rene went to a tattoo artist the Monday after the fire and had his left shoulder inked with a four-line tribute: “Cousin Freddy / R.I.P. / 02-20-03 / Keep Rockin’ “
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1975 — February 20, 2003
Andrea Mancini, 28, of Johnston, was always looking out for her family. The 9th of 11 children, Andrea was the family worrywart, and it was she who brought them together, said her family members. “Every time she left the room, everybody got a kiss,” said her oldest brother, Peter A. Jacavone Jr., 41.
She would drive her 13 nieces and nephews to school, to the mall, to get their nails done. She took her godson, Anthony Jacavone, now 4, to get his first pair of shoes. “If you needed a gofer, she’d do it,” said Robert Jacavone, 20, her youngest brother. Peter said that his sister would do anything for her parents, too. When her father had open-heart surgery last fall, Andrea cried in the hospital, said her mother, Jackie Jacavone. “She had the doctor crying, too,” she said.
At the Jacavone Garden Center, the greenhouse on the property on Route 5 in Johnston that the Jacavones have owned for decades, Andrea worked the register and ran the show. “She knew everybody, everybody knew her,” Robert Jacavone said. “She always had the scoop.” Johnston Police Chief Richard S. Tamburini said he often stopped by the gardening center, and Andrea was always there, always working, always positive. “She never had anything bad to say about anyone or anything,” Tamburini said. “I admired her so much.”
Behind it all was her love for her family. Her niece Julia Jacavone, 11 — a little Andrea, her family says — said that her aunt taught her to run the cash register. “She told me that if she had kids, or anything were to happen, I would be the one in charge of the register,” Julia said.
On the night of Feb. 20, Andrea was checking IDs at the door of The Station, where her husband of 15 months, Steven Mancini, 39, played in an opening band. Peter Jacavone said that his sister was probably right by the door when the fire broke out, but she may have gone back inside to get her husband. “She wouldn’t leave without Steve.”
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1981 — February 20, 2003
Andrew R. Hoban had never been to The Station before that Thursday night. He was there to meet a client about a refinancing deal he was working on, said Richard C. Lamendola, Andrew’s youth baseball and basketball coach in North Kingstown, who later became friends with him. “He was a kid who just happened to be in the wrong place,” said Lamendola. Andrew was 22. He graduated from the University of Rhode Island last May.
As he did every year, Andrew spent last summer and part of the fall working in the pro shop at Quidnessett Country Club, just 2 1/2 miles from the house where he grew up. His parents, John and Nancy, and younger sister, Kerrie, still live there. He was an amateur golfer who regularly competed in local tournaments and dreamed of qualifying for the professional tour.
Maybe he could have made it, too, said Brian Thimme, general manager of the country club. “He had so much potential.” Instead, when the golf season ended in November, Andrew took a job as a mortgage broker for the Homestar Mortgage Co., in North Kingstown. He probably would have been a successful broker, too, said Lamendola, who has known Andrew since he was 9. “It was just the attitude he had,” Lamendola said. “He took the talent he had and made the most of it. He was a real hard worker.”
Tall and gangly and known for a strong arm, Andrew was an all-star third baseman on the Wilson’s of Wickford Astros from 1990 to 1992. The team was North Kingstown Little League champion in 1991 and 1992. That winning streak continued when he played for the Fleet Reserve team in the town’s Senior League, and they won championships from 1993 to 1995. “I hate to say franchise player,” said Lamendola. “But that’s what he was.”
Andrew was also a forward on Catholic Youth Organization basketball teams and went on to play for the Skippers at North Kingstown High School. He was an honors student his sophomore year and graduated in 1998. Around the time he started high school, he was hired at Quidnessett Country Club.
He started out as a part-time caddy and worked up to running the golf-equipment room in the pro shop and helping to organize tournaments. Along the way, he took up golf himself. He was a popular employee — “the guy with the smile,” Thimme said.
Andrew was close to his family and the community he grew up in. That’s part of the reason why he went to URI and why he spent his summers refereeing youth basketball games, Lamendola said.
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1960 — February 20, 2003
Benjamin and Linda Suffoletto would have celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary on March 3. The couple, both 43, were the parents of an 18-year-old son, Zachary. Benjamin Joseph Suffoletto Jr. was raised in Woonsocket and graduated from Woonsocket High School and the Hall Institute in Pawtucket. He was an architect for Vision III Architects in Providence for four years, and had also worked for McKenzie Architects in Pawtucket.
Linda Dee (Sousa) Suffoletto, a 1977 graduate of Cumberland High School, was a revenue officer for the state Department of Labor and Training for the last 11 years. The Suffolettos were members of the Connecticut-based Starlight Trucker Club
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1970 — February 20, 2003
When a customer was upset with what he’d gotten from Temp-Flex Cable, it was Beth Mosczynski’s responsibility as quality control coordinator to figure out why. And that wasn’t easy, said Rose Baril, the South Grafton, Mass., electronic cable maker’s director of human resources. The job demanded detailed knowledge of the company’s manufacturing processes as well as a deft diplomatic touch, because Beth often had to call together everyone who worked on a job to find out who made the mistake. And that, her friends said, was what the 33-year-old Millbury, Mass., resident was best at.
“She had to get to bottom of problems,” Baril said. “You had to be able to bring people together.” “She was a great person,” said Mark Parella, a friend of several years who wasn’t able to get to the Great White show at The Station that night. “She was always smiling, always there for you.”
She had been looking forward to the performance at the Station, heading down from the Worcester area with friends Michael Fresolo, who also died in the fire, and James Dufresne, who was hospitalized. “She loved the ’80s,” Parella said. “I was supposed to be with those guys that night. That was her kind of music.”
She played soccer in high school and kept at it well beyond her school years, Parella said. She’d play in assorted recreational leagues and other games, usually playing three or four times a week, in season. She kept in shape. “Beth didn’t drink, she was in bed by 9 p.m.,” Baril said. “Everything that went into her mouth was healthy. Beth was the type of person who would go totally, go out of her way for anyone and everyone,” Baril said, “She always liked to help the underdog.”
Once, she remembered, Beth was at a company party and wound up talking to a man and his wife. The man worked a different shift than she did and she’d never met them before. During the conversation, the couple mentioned that their dog was sick. The next day, Beth brought in some things she thought might help the couple’s pet, a favor for someone she had never met before in her life. “She was a giant,” said Baril. “She was the glue that held us together.”
No one will get Beth’s office at Temp-Flex, Baril said. The company plans to leave it unoccupied. “We’re going to use it as a resting room,” she said. “When someone needs a little time alone, they can go there.”
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1976 — February 20, 2003
Bonnie L. Hamelin brightened a room when she walked into it. “Everyone who knew her loved her,” her mother said.
Bonnie, 27, lived on Warwick Avenue in Warwick, graduated from Warwick Veterans Memorial High School in 1993 and was listed on the honor roll. She worked alongside her mother, Claire (Hamelin) Bruyere, also of Warwick, in the cafeteria of Electric Boat in Quonset. “She was the best person in the world, and she didn’t deserve to die,” her mother said.
When her uncle got sick a year ago, Bonnie was the first one to send him a get-well card, and the first to call him. “She just said, ‘How can I help you?’ ” said her uncle, John Tomlin, of Coventry. “Bonnie cared so much about people.”
Bonnie frequently ran a little late, often rushing into church a few minutes tardy on Sunday mornings, scrambling for a seat, her uncle said.
She doted on her three cats. “They were her kids,” Tomlin said.
When she attended a family Christmas party last year, she threw her arms around relatives as she greeted them, telling them she loved them. Her generous smile was so characteristic, it’s the strongest image of Bonnie in her uncle’s mind. “She loved life and people so much,” Tomlin said. “She was always happy. The only time I can remember her crying is when her Pepe [grandfather] died two years ago.”
Bonnie’s former principal said he remembered her clearly, because she volunteered for a community-service home room and helped tutor younger students. “I remember her as a generous, vibrant, giving person, and people who are like that in high school are like that their whole lives,” said Richard Rouleau, now assistant superintendent of Warwick schools. Bonnie also loved to sing and was in the high school’s chorus, which met during school hours, as well as the chorale, an after-school activity.
A coworker described Bonnie as a sweet, warm, outgoing, friendly person. “She was always the first to say ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ even if you weren’t looking at her,” said Mia Rossi, who worked with Bonnie for two years. “She was always smiling. She just had a bubbly personality.” Rossi said Bonnie loved music and enjoyed going out to hear live music with her friends.
“She was a people person. She loved being with her family and friends.”
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1978 — February 20, 2003
She was known as “Bri.” Bridget Marie Sanetti, a 25-year-old teacher from Coventry, was stylish, outgoing and caring. She reached out to everyone, from students with emotional problems to alcoholics trying to dry out. Even her cat, Lilly, had been rescued from an animal shelter.
James Williams, principal of the small Hillside Alternative School, in Woonsocket, where Bridget taught for two years, remembers how her spirit would reach even the school’s most difficult students. “They’d come into school with a big attitude, and her smile would just light them up,” he said. Bridget’s other love was shopping, said her mother, Annmarie Swidwa, of Fort Meyers, Fla. “She was a very good dresser.” Bridget shopped at the most expensive stores, “But she was always looking for a good price,” Swidwa said.
Bridget went to the Great White concert with her friend Katie O’Donnell, 26, of Seekonk. They joined Bridget’s uncle Ricky Sanetti and some of his friends. Ricky Sanetti and his friends made it out alive, but Bridget and Katie did not. Before the show, friends had chided Bridget for wearing a nice pair of jeans, high-heeled black boots and “all the right jewelry.” She stood out amid the sea of concertgoers dressed in sweatshirts and jeans. Bridget wasn’t really a Great White fan, but she went to the show for the spectacle of seeing people jamming to tunes two decades old by rock stars with out-of-style hairdos. “She said it would be fun to laugh at all those people stuck in the ’80s,” her mother said.
Bridget’s compassion, patience and feistiness made her a successful mentor for Hillside’s at-risk teenagers. If one of her students got out of hand, Swidwa recalls, Bridget would take them to a phone and say, “You know what? You’re going to have talk to my mother.” “I would tell them they’d better behave,” Swidwa said. “Bridget turned out good because she behaved, and you’d better behave.” “I never once was in her presence when she wasn’t smiling,” said Elaine Hazzard, the Woonsocket school district’s director of special education. “Bridget was absolutely wonderful: young, sweet, caring, intelligent. The kids just truly loved her, and she truly loved the kids.”
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November 20, 1964 — February 20, 2003
Carlos L. Pimentel Sr., of West Warwick, a heavy machinery driver, spent most of his spare time on the sidelines of his children’s sporting events or in his yard landscaping. His kids were his life. Everything he did, he did for them. Carlos was a family man. He loved to be with his wife and children and could be found cheering his kids on at every game they played.
Mr. Pimentel, 38, leaves two sons, 12-year-old Carlos Jr. and 9-year-old Cullen, and two daughters, Savannah, 15, and Cheyenne, 10. He also leaves his wife of 16 years, Dorothy L. (Ferrara) Pimentel. Carlos was born in Sao Miguel, the Azores, With his parents and seven brothers, he came to this country as a young child. His family settled in West Warwick.
Mr. Pimentel had been working for C. Spirito Inc., of Massachusetts, for four years. He previously owned the former Cheyenne Construction company. His hobby was landscaping. His yard was described “like a park” — with two fish ponds, a little river and a bridge. The ponds once had frogs, but the frogs were eating the fish. He watched over “tons” of plants and built a stamped concrete patio. You could find Carlos outside with his sons working in the yard and making it look beautiful. A motorcycle enthusiast, Mr. Pimentel was looking forward to buying a bike soon. “My uncle will always be remembered for his beautiful smile, loving spirit and big heart. Everything he did, he did for his family. A piece of our family is gone and cannot be replaced. His memory will live on forever.”
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1964 — February 20, 2003
The yearbook entry for Carlton “Bud” Howorth III, Class of 1981, Cohasset High School, lists his pet peeve as “wasting time.” “He was in a hurry,” says John MacLeman, a friend and former colleague. “He wanted to get it all in. “You could tell he was just soaking it up, every minute he spent with you,” MacLeman said.
Perhaps that stemmed from his abounding enthusiasm for the things he loved. And there were a lot of things he loved. “He talked in absolutes,” MacLeman said. At restaurants, Buddy would tell the waitress, “This is the best hamburger I’ve ever had.”
He loved bacon and eggs. He loved fishing, skiing, football and hockey. He loved his two black Labradors. He loved his girlfriend, Donna Reis. “He put me on a pedestal,” she says. And he loved his blond daughter Elizabeth, now 3. “He adored her, she adored him,” says his father, Carlton Howorth II, also known as Bud. “She was his life.”
Buddy, 39, was a child of the ’80s. He loved heavy-metal music, the sound that characterized that decade for many, and, according to his girlfriend, he was a “computer geek.” Mr. Howorth said his only son, a technical support manager at Ciber Corp. in Woburn, found the hard-rock sound relaxing. But the fast-living image that went along with a lot of the bands didn’t apply to him. “He was a clean-cut kid,” the father said. “He just happened to like that music.”
At the memorial service for Buddy, the minister quoted Bruce Springsteen and Motley Crue from the pulpit of the pristine white-clapboard Second Congregational Church, in Cohasset, Mass.
Engaging. Passionate about music. Adoring. These are some of the words used by friends to describe him. Photographs from various stages of life show him as a youngster in the snow, as a teenager with the football team, and as a grown man, beaming as he holds his daughter up for the camera.
“He believed in always being happy,” Donna said. He had recovered from cancer, and the experience made him live for the moment. “He had the greatest outlook on life after that.” John MacLeman says Buddy and his ex-wife, Karen, set him up on a blind date with a friend of theirs named Susan. It worked. They are getting married in October.
That Thursday night at The Station, Buddy and Donna were right next to the stage when the fire started. When Donna fell down in the crush, Buddy pushed her to safety.
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March 5, 1967 — February 20, 2003
Charline Elaine Gingras-Fick was not just a professional dog groomer. She was also a Gulf War veteran.
So, even when the dog was a real-life “Cujo” — the rabid St. Bernard in the Stephen King novel — Charline wouldn’t hesitate to give it a bath or shampoo, or trim its toenails, said Tarah James, a coworker at the Petco store in South Attleboro. “She got bit. She got bit several times,” said Charline’s mother, Lorraine (Paquette) Desrochers. Was she discouraged? “Are you kidding?” Desrochers said. “She couldn’t wait to go to work.”
Charline was one of four children of Edward G. Gingras, who lives in Bellingham, Mass., and Desrochers, who remarried after she and Edward Gingras divorced.
She rode a motorcycle at age 14, brought home stray animals while she was growing up in Pawtucket, and went to William M. Davies Jr. Career and Technical High School in Lincoln, where she learned cabinet-making.
In 1988, a year after she finished at the Pedigree Professional School of Dog Grooming in Lynn, Mass., she enlisted in the Army and became a diesel mechanic. “In other words,” said Desrochers, “she was a tomboy from day one.” Specialist Gingras took part in Operation Desert Storm, repairing Jeeps, trucks and Humvees.
While she was in the Army, she married another soldier, Larry Fick, of Merrill, Mich. After they divorced, she and Fick agreed to share in the upbringing of their two children, Samantha, 12, and William, 10. Each parent would have custody for seven years.
In 1995, Charline moved back to Rhode Island and went into the dog-grooming business. She bought a two-family house in Central Falls and had her mother and stepfather, Henry D. Desrochers, move in downstairs so the children would have someone to look after them while she was working.
Samantha and William have been back with their father since September.
Charline worked the 1 to 9 p.m. shift at Petco that Thursday night, then went with a friend to The Station. She wasn’t in the nightclub more than five minutes, Desrochers said, when the fire broke out.
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November 29, 1965 — February 20, 2003
The garden at Christina DiRienzo’s house in Plymouth, Mass., is filled with red: she loved the hummingbirds that crimson-hued flowers would draw. In addition to the red garden, Tina kept a vegetable garden, where she grew tomatoes and peppers that she canned.
Tina, 37, shared the house and acre of grounds with her companion, Russell Tripp, whom she had known since high school in Wareham. The two kept a menagerie — three goats, cats, and a host of other animals. When not gardening or taking care of her animals, Tina loved to go country-and-western dancing, and to groove to the “oldies but goodies.”
Tina and Russell would go to dances at Redman’s Hall in Wareham, often joining her mother, Patricia Pina, and her mother’s husband, John. Patricia says she would often dance with her daughter: “She’d say, ‘Come on, Mom, this is our song.’ ” Their songs included classics like Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” and “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
“Sometimes we’d even have a house party here, and she and I would get up and dance,” Patricia said. The two also enjoyed quiet Thursday nights at the Pinas’ house, playing kitty whist with Tina’s sister Terry Rakoski and Patricia’s sister-in-law.
Patricia was glad to have Tina as a companion, and had missed her during the eight years Tina spent in Kentucky with her then-husband, Peter, and two sons, Peter and Beau. “We did get a chance to go down and visit them, a couple of years before they came back, but it was way too short,” Patricia said. “I wanted her to come back with me.”
Four years ago, Tina and her family returned. “We still just didn’t have enough time together to make up for lost time,” Patricia said. Tina was also trying to catch up with her sister, Terry. The two went to The Station together — Patricia said heavy metal was Terry’s interest, not Tina’s. The night was a regular get-together with the girls,
Patricia said. The two were supposed to go with three other friends, but only one joined them, Kristine Carbone, Terry’s neighbor in Taunton. All three women died in the fire.
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1968 — February 20, 2003
When Chris Prouty was about 11, he got an award as the most unselfish player on his basketball team. In the dedication, his coaches credited his “willingness to learn” and his improving defensive skills as a major reason behind a winning season. His generosity was a trait that defined Christopher Karnig “Squiggy” Prouty as an adult. “If he had a hundred dollars and you needed a hundred and ten, he’d go out and borrow the other ten,” says John J. Speranza, owner of Real Deal Auto Sales and Service in Uxbridge, where Chris worked. Just last week, Chris sold a Mustang and gave the customer back $20 of the sale price. “He said, ‘Here, the first tank of gas is on me.’ ”
Tall, handsome, and funny, Chris was a ladies man, Speranza says. He “wore his emotions on his sleeve,” Speranza says. “If he liked you . . . there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you.” Speranza says he had only known Chris for about a year, but it seemed like a lifetime. He bought and sold automobiles for Speranza, bringing to the job the expertise of a certified mechanic. “He was a smart guy. He was gifted . . . the computerized end of things . . and he loved it,” Speranza says. And a deal he sealed with a handshake was just as good as a written contract. “When something went his way, he would put his fingers together and go, ‘Excellent,’ just like Mr. Burns on The Simpsons,” Speranza says
Chris, 34, had two sets of friends, a whole “family” of them in central Massachusetts and another — the ones he grew up with — in Rhode Island. Chris loved video games so much that his Massachusetts friends called him “the gamer.” He had to have the latest release the moment it came out, Speranza says. That he loved cars almost went without saying. In his garage on Walcott Street in Pawtucket, he left an old Camaro primed and ready for a paint job. His mother, Nancy A. Lee, says she will make sure it is painted the canary yellow Chris wanted.
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1973 — February 20, 2003
It was Christopher G. Arruda’s dream to drive a truck. Ever since Chris was a little boy, he had loved cars and trucks. He collected model cars, hoarded stacks of car magazines and worked in the pit crew for friends racing at Seekonk Speedway.
In the backyard of the house on Blackrock Road in Coventry where he lived with his mother and grandmother, he kept a white Ford Ranger that he equipped with big monster-truck tires. His “baby” was an old ugly brown Pontiac that he got as a 16-year-old and only sold last year. And about seven years ago, Chris got a job as a truck driver for D&N Equipment, of Johnston. “That really made him happy,” says his mother, Patricia Arruda.
Keith Danna, of Coventry, met Chris at the old Bess Eaton doughnut shop on Tiogue Avenue, where “car guys” used to hang out. Chris was known for his “bumblebee car” — a yellow-and-black Dodge Aspen. “He’s great with kids and dogs,” Danna said. “He was just a good guy. Not too many people don’t know him. He’s got more friends than you can believe.”
Chris, 30, was talkative and generous. He was strong, too. He once broke his ankle getting out of his truck and kept walking, even showing up for work the next day when others told him to take it easy. “He’d see people broken down on the side of the road and he’d stop,” Patricia Arruda said. “I told him, ‘You’re crazy in this day and age to stop.’ He’d say, ‘Ma, don’t worry about it.’ He always wanted to help.”
Even on the night he died, Chris thought of others. Patricia Arruda said she heard from people who were at The Station that her son made it out of the club, but went back inside to help people escape.
Chris’s other passion was music. His favorite was Pink Floyd, and he also liked ’80s rock bands. He was a regular at The Station and was friendly with an AC/DC tribute band that played there. “He had a sad side, too,” Patricia Arruda said. “Besides driving the truck, I don’t think he really ever found the happiness he wanted. He had gone through a bad time and was just starting to act like himself.”
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1957 — February 20, 2003
From a young age, he loved drums. He was banging out a staccato beat before he could walk. He used to bang spoons on the table, said his father, Donald Latulippe, of Randolph, Mass. “Like Mozart played the piano at 3, he played drums,” he said.
Father and son had different tastes. Dad loved classical. Dale loved rock and wore his hair long, even at age 46. “He wore his hair long, which we tried to fight many times.” Did he ever win? “Never.”
Dale, who was divorced, still lived with his former wife in Carver, Mass., and ran a used car lot in Wareham, Mass., his father said. He had a 7-year-old son, Dustin, the “spitting image” of his dad, who also plays the drums. Dale was a fan of heavy-metal rock, especially Aerosmith. “He followed the bands and that was his life. He did it all his life, until the day he died,” his father said.
Donald Latulippe, who used to work at WRKO radio in Massachusetts, said his son once stopped by the station with a group of friends, dressed up like the band KISS, right down to the wild makeup and skin-tight pants. “I nearly died a thousand deaths,” he said, laughing.
Donald Latulippe said he had no idea his son was in Rhode Island until the Saturday after the fire, when his daughter-in-law came and told him Dale had died. He’d only recently found his son’s birth certificate in a strongbox and had taken it out to send to him.
“He was a loving kid. He loved me, that’s for sure.”
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1966 — February 20, 2003
Daniel John Fredrickson was a simple man, with simple pleasures. Dan liked nothing better than a barbecue, a back deck and sitting with family and friends around a fire, strumming a guitar, according to his older brother Gus, of Oakville, Wash.
Music was a passion since Dan hit his teens. He spent hours spinning 45s on a turntable in his upstairs bedroom, his brother said. He didn’t have a favorite. “He just liked them all.” At 18, he taught himself to play guitar, taking time each day to practice. “It was his peace of mind,” Gus Frederickson said. In later years, he often played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.”
Dan grew up in Elma, Wash., where he learned to fish and bow-hunt with his three brothers — pursuits he continued after he moved away from the area upon joining the Navy in 1983. “We were like ‘The Three Amigos,’ but there were four of us,” his brother said. He also cultivated his cooking skills, mastering marinated pork and chicken on the grill and homemade pizza.
A chief petty officer in the Navy, Dan planned to retire and return to Washington in six months, his brother said. Since May 2000, he had been assigned to the Naval Submarine Base New London, in Groton, Conn. Dan, 37, and his wife, Tracey Romanoff, 33, of Coventry, attended the show at The Station Feb. 20 because Great White was a favorite band, Gus said. For Dan, it was probably his seventh show.
Dan’s career was marked by generosity, as he often worked holidays and weekends for his staff, his brother said. “He was a person who was younger than me, but I looked up to him.” The 20 to 25 staff members Dan supervised within the quality assurance division in New London revered him as well, said Chief Petty Officer Yvonne Stoner, who worked with him for three years.
“He had a lot of respect for people and in turn he got a lot of respect,” Stoner said. “He always remembered where he came from in applying his leadership.” While he was extremely skilled as a technician inspecting submarines, his interests crept into the workplace. He tantalized his coworkers with homemade meals; photographs of his four children and his motorcycle adorned his desk.
“He missed his kids a lot,” Stoner said of Dan’s four children from a previous marriage — Kenneth, 17; 14- year-old twins Amanda and Ryan; and Amber, 12 — who remained in Washington. “He was a real family man.”
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1967 — February 20, 2003
Dennis Smith taught himself how to ride a unicycle when he was 5 years old, and he was still riding one at age 36, up and down Calder Street in Pawtucket, where he lived with his folks, and charmed the neighborhood children. “They just watched him,” said his mother, Doris Smith, 69. “They were all eyes. He tried to jump the curb and do tricks. And they would clap for him.”
It was typical that Dennis would be the one adult on the block who’d go outside to have a snowball fight with the children, as he often did this winter. You could say that, at 36, he was still a kid himself. He was a worker of wood, a landscaper and an expert player of pool. Mostly, he was a son, a brother, a friend. You could say Dennis Smith had kids of his own if you counted all the neighborhood children.
Richard DeAndrade was Dennis’s best friend — and certainly his oldest. Everyone knew them as a constant pair, Dennis and Richie. They hung around as kids, and though Richie is married, they hung around almost daily as adults, both living on Calder Street. Starting at age 10 or so, they skated just about every weekend at the old Bobby’s Rollerway on Newport Avenue, before it was turned into a banquet hall. Richie recalled how Dennis, even into adulthood, would unexpectedly appear at parties dressed as a clown, sometimes with his unicycle, just to give everyone a kick. The unicycle, though, was his main thing. It gave him the nickname, “One-wheeler.”
A huge heart, one friend said. A prankster. Always laughing. You know those people where everything gets a lot more fun once they show up? That was Dennis. He loved to go out, and always seemed to run into people he knew. “He was Pawtucket,” one friend said. Dennis and his dad, Leo, spent countless hours in a workshop in the home they shared, and Dennis was always generous with his carpentry skills.
Thomas Benevides was a neighbor of Dennis’s on Calder Street. Last year, Benevides decided to put an addition on his home, doing the work himself. Dennis began to help him, carrying some lumber. The next day, he was there again, and the next, ultimately seeing the project through for months, for no reason except that’s what Dennis felt a neighbor does. “True friends don’t come into your life that much,” said Benevides. “Dennis was a true friend.” That extended to all the neighborhood kids: Amanda, Cassie, Tommy, David, Richie, Brendon, Colin, Greg, Jay and Alex. They all signed a card at his funeral, fixed beneath a floral arrangement made to look like a stack of snowballs. A kid himself, everyone said of Dennis Smith. A kid forever.
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March 29, 1970 — February 20, 2003
In the dreamy land of California, Derek B. Johnson once helped an ailing boy meet Shaquille O’Neal and a sick girl visit Disneyland. A small-town New Jersey boy, Derek divided his time between two coasts, and came to Rhode Island to work for an Internet-security company with a Fortune 500 client list.
But before he moved to West Warwick last year, he helped children with life-threatening diseases live out their fantasies. “He was a shining star,” said Michelle Wells of the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Orange County, in Tustin, Calif.
In less than two years, the 32-year-old volunteer helped the charity grant eight wishes to children — a significant number, Wells said. Despite the emotional toll of working with children stricken by terrible illnesses, Derek was a tireless worker who got “down on his hands and knees to talk to children,” Wells said.
He also sold tickets to the fire department’s annual pancake breakfast.
“Derek wanted to help, to give and to serve,” Wells said. “Derek was a man of tremendous character.”
“He was born that way,” says his mother, Patricia, in Anaheim, Calif. “He was the most loving person. He took everything in stride.”
Derek’s generosity may have been shaped by an early life in Harmony, N.J., a small town near the Pennsylvania border. His father, Robert, was an electronics repairman who eventually opened a shop in Easton. Derek graduated from Trebas Recording Institute in Hollywood. A movie buff, skydiver and singer, he attended North Hampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pa.
Both Derek and his brother Robert Jr. took jobs with Zoneoftrust, a California Internet-security company. When the Waltham, Mass.-based Guardent Inc. bought Zoneoftrust, Robert Jr. stayed in California and Derek moved to West Warwick to work in Guardent’s Providence office as a security-operations manager.
When Great White appeared at The Station, Derek and four other Guardent employees went to the concert. Two survived the fire. Derek, Scott Griffith and Ryan Morin did not.
“We’re a very close-knit organization,” said Jennifer Haas, a spokeswoman for the 140-person company, which held a memorial service for the victims. “It was like losing family members.” Derek, she said, “was one of those managers you rarely come across. He put his team first. And he always had a smile on his face.” Robert Jr., who attended the memorial, agreed.
“He was everybody’s best friend. He was my best friend.”
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November 4, 1980 — February 20, 2003
Derek J. Gray knew how to draw a crowd by playing guitar, telling jokes on a friend’s stoop, or starring in a school play.
At age 22, he was looking forward to a new role: being a father. His fiancée, Barbara McGill, is due to have their baby in August. Derek proposed to Barbara this fall. “They were just so excited about getting married,” friend Lauren DiPierna says. The prospects of fatherhood scared Derek at first, but then he became excited about it. “He wanted a boy to listen to his rock music with him,” Lauren says.
An avid guitarist and songwriter, Derek wanted to be famous. “He wanted to start a band in California and do all his stuff out there,” Lauren says. Derek was a fan of rock ‘n’ roll bands from the 1980s, following groups such as Warrant, Poison, and Dokken. He wore T-shirts with logos from his favorite bands and carried pictures of himself posed with his favorite singers, Bret Michaels of Poison and Jani Lane of Warrant.
“Any time you talked about music, his eyes just lit up, and it was like a child on Christmas morning,” agrees Tony Palaza, a manager at Lowe’s Hardware, where Derek sold lumber. While Derek followed bands on weekends, he kept in touch with friends at home in Burlington, Mass. “Every time he left us, he’d tell us all that he loved us,” said Lauren.
Once when Derek spent a weekend in Vermont to see Warrant, he sent Lauren a letter to entertain his friends who hung out on her front stoop. He included a personal note to each; he told Lauren that she was like a second sister to him, and said she had a beautiful singing voice.
During his senior year at Burlington High School, Derek played the gangster in the school play, Kiss Me Kate. Lauren recalls rehearsing scenes with him — he replaced the scripted words “au revoir” with “oh ravioli” to make the cast members laugh.
On the basketball court, playing pick-up games in the park with his friends, he drew attention — not only because of his height (he was 6 feet 5 inches) — but also from his attire. He would play wearing cowboy boots and leather pants.
After graduating from Burlington High School, Derek went to work for Home Depot, and started at Lowe’s seven months ago, putting great effort into his job. Last September, he was named employee of the month. “The lumber aisle is still his aisle, even though he may not be here,” Palaza said.
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February 20, 1963 — February 20, 2003
Always in motion, always pushing forward, always planning the future. Those who loved Dina Ann DeMaio, 30, say determination defined her life. “Nothing was going to stop her,” her brother Vincent M. DeMaio said in the kitchen of the West Warwick apartment Dina shared with their mother, Patricia Belanger, and Dina’s 7-year-old son, Justin Perry DeMaio.
“She was motivated. She had energy. People around here have a simple life, simple jobs. Dina wanted more, for herself and her son.” She graduated from Lincoln High School in 1991 and went on to be the first in her family to graduate from college, earning her associate’s and then her bachelor’s degree in court stenography from Johnson & Wales University in 1999.
She worked full time for the last six years at Textron Financial Corp. in Providence as a legal secretary. She was a single mother, raising Justin with the help of her mother. Last year, Dina started a master’s program at her alma mater, studying to become a paralegal.
She’d get home from night classes and get to work on a computer in a corner of her mother’s small living room, studying until midnight, rising at 6 a.m. to get Justin ready for school. She never complained. Dina took a job waitressing at The Station last November to make a little extra pocket money “so she could take Justin out, get him things,” Patricia said.
Patricia raced to Rhode Island Hospital hours after the fire with a photograph of her eldest daughter, begging for information, and drove to Boston to see if one of the two Jane Does was her Dina. But no one matched the description: 5’3″, slim, with short, sleek light-brown hair and a wide, warm smile.
That Thursday was Dina’s 30th birthday. Her older brother, Vincent, called her to wish her a happy birthday between fares at his job as a cab driver near Austin, Texas. “She said, ‘I’m 20, not 30,’ and I said ‘I guess that makes me 22, then, not 32,’ ” Vincent said.
She told him that her boss had called her in that night so that she could celebrate her birthday with her friends on Friday, the night she usually worked. One of Dina’s friends who worked with her at Textron, Dawn Brindamour, said a group of 12 cousins and friends planned to take her to their favorite haunts, Restaurant Prov and Art Bar.
“She was the organizer, pulling us all together,” Dawn said. “She loved life. She planned trips. We all went to Universal Studios last year with our children and had the time of our lives.” Before she left for work that night, she and her mother discussed houses — Dina was starting to look at two-families near her mother’s Pawtuxet Terrace apartment.
She told her mother she wanted them all to go to Las Vegas this year. She said maybe after her master’s, she’d join the reserves. “She was always making plans,” Patricia said. “Justin was her world. How she had the energy to do all she did, I’ll never know. She amazed me.”
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1957 — February 20, 2003
Donald Roderiques was finally living again after years of personal turmoil. Last fall, he had vacationed in Atlantic City, N.J. He had treated his parents to dinner for their wedding anniversary in December. And he eagerly awaited a scheduled trip to Disney World with his parents and siblings. After a recent visit with his mother in Fall River, Mr. Roderiques, 46, kissed her goodbye for the first time since he was a little boy. It seemed like he had finally overcome the tragic death of his younger brother 14 years ago. “It was a tough thing for him to accept,” says his mother, Jeanne Roderiques. “He kind of gave up on life for a while.”
Mr. Roderiques had always been close to his brother Ronald, who was only 10 months younger than he. Ronald died in 1989, when a vehicle he was in rolled off a New Bedford pier and into the Acushnet River. His older brother was heartbroken. It wasn’t long before his life was falling apart. He separated from his second wife. He left his maintenance job at the Fall River Superior Court House. At one point, Mr. Roderiques was living in a New Bedford shelter.
Then, about three years ago, he found some help and landed a maintenance mechanic’s position at Mashpee Village on Cape Cod. He had his own apartment in the housing complex. “He was a good worker,” said Mario Leduc, a coworker. “He was a quick learner.” Mr. Roderiques had a few hobbies to keep him going. He loved concerts and rock ‘n’ roll. He liked tattoos. He had so many of them that his friends called him “Inky.” And Mr. Roderiques loved motorcycles, too. He didn’t own any, but he kept dozens of motorcycle models in his apartment. He hoped to drive his own Harley-Davidson some day. “I was just about on the verge of going and buying him one this summer,” said his mother.
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1974 — February 20, 2003
She saved the ribbons. Blue and red, first and second place, they are some markers of Donna M. Mitchell’s life that her mother, Joanne, cherishes. Donna won them during countless afternoons spent swimming or doing other things as a little girl at the Fall River YMCA. “She made me very proud,” her mother says. When Donna grew up, other things made her mother proud.
Donna, 29, didn’t have to make Thanksgiving dinner for the guests each year at the Best Western hotel in Fall River where she worked. But she did. “With all the trimmings,” boasts her mother. She didn’t have to take in a stray cat found at a warehouse where a friend worked. And she didn’t have to stop at a Swansea bakery on Sundays to pick up a slice of lemon-meringue pie for her mother. “She would always do things like that. She was very generous.”
Joanne shared her memories of a little girl, a teenager, and a woman who sometimes held down two jobs to take care of her kids. As a child growing up in Swansea, Donna had plenty of guests. “We had sleep-overs,” said Joanne. “I would call home and she’d say, ‘Can [a friend] stay for supper?’ She always had friends over. This continued throughout her school years.”
Donna enjoyed gymnastics. And she was a cheerleader at Joseph Case High School in Swansea, from which she graduated in 1991. Donna wasn’t into sports much, but she grew to love football. Defying geography, she was a Pittsburgh Steelers fan. Donna also liked Boston Bruins hockey.
Donna, who moved to Fall River, grew to have five or six close friends in her 20s. During summers, they would make pilgrimages to Virginia Beach to catch some rays. She loved to watch the television show Friends. Sometimes, she would go to a cousin’s place in Franklin, Mass., for a Friends night. Other times, Donna would go to local bingo events, such as ones at St. Anne’s Church, Fall River, with her mother.
Donna had two daughters, Brooklyn and Joslynn Belanger. She wanted them to be part of a family and planned to marry Robert Feeney of Fall River next year.
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May 24, 1971 — February 20, 2003
Edward B. Corbett III, 31, went to Earth Day in Boston every year, and he always made a point of giving homeless people a dollar and a few cigarettes, his family remembers. “He was compassionate,” says his stepfather, Mike Eaton. “People on the street you would shun or ignore, Eddie would go right up to them and talk to them.”
A perfectionist at work, Eddie disliked “hackers,” says his brother, Shawn P. Corbett of East Greenwich, who worked alongside his elder brother for 11 years. The brothers were self-employed plasterers for Classic Interiors of Narragansett.
Together, they had plastered several mansions in Newport. “Ed hated people who didn’t do things professionally, who didn’t care,” Shawn says. “Because he cared.” Eddie, who lived on Bank Street in West Warwick, was the eldest of a tight-knit family of full and half siblings who all call each other brothers and sisters. They were reunited in the late 1980s, when Eddie moved from Florida.
He reveled in socializing and having a good time, and took over the grill when the family threw its annual Fourth of July cookout. “He felt unification,” says his brother Daniel B. Casey of East Greenwich. “He just finally felt like this was home, just all one big family, when all of us came together.”
Eddie loved to surf, skateboard and hang out at the beach in Narragansett, both for the waves and the cute women. He was opinionated — never shy — and always wore a baseball cap, even to his brother’s wedding. Eddie also dressed in layers — sometimes wearing three T-shirts he’d take off gradually — one shirt for work, one for dinner, one for going out.
The extra clothing padded his 5-feet, 8-inch frame. “He just had everything on him — ready to go,” says his sister Ruth M. Corbett of East Greenwich. “In every season. That was just him.” When they found him at The Station, Ed was wearing two pairs of shorts, two pairs of socks and two fleece pullovers.
Eddie was a collector who hoarded the front pages of newspapers after a big event, coasters from bars, and odd bits and pieces from rummage sales. Once, he found an old roll-top desk and delivered it as a surprise to his brother’s house.
He loved Moet champagne and was the first one to buy friends a drink. He doted on his nieces and nephews, taking them canoeing on the Narrow River near his parents’ house in Narragansett or buying them treats when the ice cream truck arrived.
Eddie wouldn’t just buy for his relatives — he would buy for all the children who raced up to the truck. “He remembered what it was like to not get an ice cream,” Ruth said.
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August 21, 1973 — February 20, 2003
Twenty-nine-year-old Edward E. Ervanian found joy in every aspect of his life. He loved his family and fiancée, he loved his job as a department manager at Stop & Shop, he loved working with youths at St. Joseph Church in West Warwick, he loved all New England sports teams, and he loved almost every kind of music — from religious hymns to Eminem’s rap.
All of this shone through in his 1,000-watt smile, and his family likes to recall that one friend said that “once you meet Eddy and your life was touched by him, you never forgot him.” He was a gentle bear of a young man who would scoop his mother up in hugs and always looked forward to nights with his dad when they would go out for dinner and a movie.
“Our son was a rare breed,” said Edward C. Ervanian, as he sat with his wife, Polly, in their Warwick living room. “He truly loved everyone.” He also had a great sense of humor, whether it was his love for puns (the cornier the better) or his ability to happily and loudly belt out a hymn in church even though his family kept telling him he had the voice of “a bullfrog.”
He had so much he was looking forward to. Just two months ago, he became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Stephanie Bowering of Warwick. Ed showed his mother the ring he had picked out to get her opinion, and then, on Christmas Eve, took Stephanie for a ride along the beach and proposed to her in the car. The couple were planning to wed May 22, 2004.
“Eddy was already part of their family,” his mother said of the Bowerings. He was very much his own person, his parents say. They always took him to church when he was young, but he developed his own, stronger tie to the church — serving as Eucharistic minister at St. Joseph and also being active in the Pawtuxet Valley CYO and Rejoice & Hope CYO in Cranston. He was also a member of the LaSalette Youth Group.
Although he didn’t play on any sports teams, his mother said he was a walking statistician for every professional sport, particularly the Red Sox, the New England Patriots and the Providence Bruins. “My son lived by two books,” his father said. “The Holy Bible and the sports section of the newspaper.”
Although his dad is a retired deputy fire chief from the Cranston Fire Department, Ed chose to find his own career path — working at several Stop & Shop supermarkets before being appointed manager of the seafood department at the chain’s Richmond store.
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September 20, 1970 — February 20, 2003
Eric Hyer’s hair was just growing back in. Friends said he’d recently cut off his long ponytail and shipped it to a charity group that uses donated hair to make wigs for children with cancer. “It’s just the kind of guy he was,” says Brian Allsworth, a friend of Eric’s since the two met in 1988 as sophomores at Scituate High School. “He did it and didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
Eric, 32, seems to have passed through many people’s lives as a quiet, generous man. He was a mellow guy who got along easily with everyone, but who had no problem doing things alone. “Sometimes he would just go out by himself,” Allsworth says. “As far as I know, he went to the Great White concert by himself. He was just following a different drummer all the time.”
Eric had a knack for being the channel through which relatives and old friends kept in touch. In November, Allsworth said, Eric called a bunch of high school friends and got them to meet up in Warwick for a few games of pool. Chris Arruda, another victim of The Station fire, was one of the guys who showed up that night. This was typical behavior, Allsworth said; Eric just liked getting people together.
The youngest of five brothers, Eric led a simple life. He loved cookouts, fishing and family gatherings. He also loved kids, and could spend hours hanging out with his nieces and nephews.
“He would do anything with anybody and have fun doing it,” says his brother Mark Hyer. Mark described Eric as the one who kept his four older brothers talking. He remembered birthdays and anniversaries, and he always called, just to check in.
“Once you met him, it was like everyone was part of his family,” Mark Hyer said. “He brought a little bit of love and life to everybody.” Eric even managed to get Mark and their father talking again after 12 years of silence.
At Mark’s home in Coventry, Eric’s belongings are now in boxes, many of them full of reasons why Eric went to The Station to see the band Great White play. “There’s like seven boxes of CDs,” Mark said. “He loved music, all kinds.”
Eric lived in Coventry with Mark and his wife, Colleen, and their children, Mark Jr., 12, and Jake, 5, for several months when he moved back to Rhode Island last summer. Before that, Eric had lived in Texas for about eight years. He had recently moved in with relatives in Scituate.
Eric was especially close to his nephew Mark Jr. Most Sundays, the two went to Best Buy together, or to Boston Market for roast beef sandwiches. Sometimes, they would even fight like brothers.
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August 16, 1981 — February 20, 2003
Eugene Avilez had big dreams, and was trying to make all of them come true. A full-time student, Gino still found time to take guitar lessons, hold a job, attend a lot of concerts, mow the lawn regularly, and repair his mom’s roof.
Gino, 21, was reserved, yet he dreamed of becoming a rock star and traveling the globe. “The last time he was here, he was playing his guitar. I was really impressed,” says his dad, Higinio. “He would ask me, ‘Do you remember that song?’ and then play a bit of it, and it would sound right.” He was taking electric-guitar lessons because he was intent on starting his own band.
Gino brought the same dedication to his studies. He graduated from Burlington (Mass.) High School in 1999. At graduation, classmate and close friend Derek Gray told Higinio that Gino was the force keeping him in school, motivating him to get his diploma.
For the past year, Gino had continued his studies at RETS Technical Center in Boston. “He was a quiet and very hard-working student, very dedicated,” says Don Harris, the school’s director. Gino was slated to complete the program in July as a certified electronics technician, prepared for a job repairing equipment for nearly any industry.
He balanced school with work at Starbucks in Woburn. During high school, he worked as an attendant at a Texaco station in Burlington, and as a clerk at Dale Pharmacy in Burlington. His supervisor at the pharmacy described him as a “very outwardly nice young man.” When he finished at RETS in July, he planned to take a trip with his father to his dad’s native country of Belize. “He wanted to go back there and visit everybody and just trace his roots,” Higinio said.
He had other plans, too: he was supposed to be the best man in Derek Gray’s Sept. 24 wedding. The pair were “like night and day, but they were still best friends,” says their friend Lauren DiPierna. They were united in part by their shared passion for rock ‘n’ roll. They attended concerts nearly every week and went to hear Great White at The Station together.
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1973 — February 20, 2003
Everett T. Woodmansee III — known as Tommy — was a spirited sports fan. A loyal follower of the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots and NASCAR driver Mark Martin, he was ecstatic when the Patriots won the Super Bowl last year. “I’m glad he lived to see that,” said his sister, Cheryl Haines. Tommy lived with Cheryl and her family in Charlestown.
Tommy, 30, was a trivia buff, belonged to a horseshoe league, and had a warm, outgoing personality. A music lover, he could often be heard singing around the house. “He could always make you laugh,” his sister said. While they were growing up in Carolina, Haines said, she used to take care of Tommy, who was 10 years her junior, while their parents were at work. “We were very close. I loved him dearly,” she said. “I was like a second mother to him.”
A graduate of Chariho High School, Tommy graduated from the New England Institute of Technology in 1995. He had been working as a union electrician with the International Brotherhood of Electricians, Local 99, and served for three years in the Army National Guard, in East Greenwich. Haines said that her brother saved the life of his girlfriend, Ashley Poland of Narragansett, during the fire. “He pushed her up to the window and got her out,” she said. “Then he started helping others get out. That’s in his nature.”
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April 15, 1981 — February 20, 2003
Jimmy C. Gahan, a high school athlete turned college disc jockey, was gearing up for a big interview with Great White on Feb. 20. Gahan, 21, of Falmouth, Mass., planned to air the interview on his college radio show at Nichols College in Dudley, Mass. “When he gave up whatever dreams he had in sports — the music filled that vacuum,” his father said. James Gahan III, 58, said his son was trying to carve out a niche in the music industry. Jimmy had launched his first show on college radio last fall, and was running three shows a week.
His mother, Carol, said two of her son’s shows focused on ’80s rock music, including his favorite big ’80s band, Poison. The disc jockey liked the song, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” But Jimmy also had an interest in country music. He had negotiated some interviews with singers Blake Shelton and Mark Wills. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to land an interview with Tim McGraw, following a concert at Mohegan Sun in Connecticut.
Jimmy Gahan grew up in a cottage on Katharine Lee Bates Road in Falmouth. He was his parents’ only child. He was a standout athlete at Falmouth High School, his parents said. He played football, basketball, baseball and golf. He dreamed of a professional baseball career.
He relished the Patriots’ Super Bowl victory in 2002. For reasons that no one can explain, Jimmy was an avid fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes. After graduating from high school, he spent time at a prep school and moved on to Stonehill College, in North Easton, Mass.
A year later, he transferred to Nichols. He had made the dean’s list last semester. His major was business, his mother said. Jimmy went to The Station with a close friend, Michael Richardi, of Worcester, who escaped the fire by jumping out a window.
Pictures from Jimmy’s childhood cover the walls in his parents’ kitchen. The framed photographs take up nearly every inch of wall space.
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1966 — February 20, 2003
James F. Gooden Jr. knew everybody’s name, and everybody knew his laugh. Jimmy was the deli manager at Hi-Lo in Swansea and a devoted husband and stepfather. “He loved to laugh. He loved to make other people laugh,” said his wife, Lori Ann Gooden. Customers and coworkers could hear him chuckling across the store. He was the kind of guy who remembered customers’ names and asked about their kids.
During his coffee break, Jimmy would call his wife, an assistant branch manager at a bank, to tell her that he loved her. “I feel like what I had in 10 years with him some people don’t have in a lifetime,” Lori Ann said. “We understood what made a relationship work. We were committed to each other. At the end of the day, we always wanted to be together.”
Jimmy, 37, was born in Providence and lived on Clarence Street in Cranston. He graduated from La Salle Academy in 1983 and joined the National Guard as a member of the 119th Military Police unit. In 1995, he earned an associate’s degree in business entrepreneurship from Johnson & Wales. “Ideally, he wanted to open a cafe, one that had bands, kind of like what The Station did,” said his brother John Gooden. “He wanted to name it Moonlight Mile, after the Stones song.”
Jimmy loved to attend concerts at small venues so he could get close to the band. He bought advance tickets to the Great White show and went with Gino Companatico, Andrew Paskowski, and a friend of Paskowski’s. The three others were injured but survived.
Jimmy met Lori Ann in 1992 when they both worked at Almacs on Elmwood Avenue. They married in 1995. Her children, Jessica L. and Lauren J. Iacobucci, were 6 and 4 at the time. “He took to them. He was like a big kid himself,” Lori Ann said.
Jimmy stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 220 pounds. He worked out almost daily at Future Fitness Center. He enjoyed skiing, fishing and going to the beach. He loved to be surrounded by friends, and to crack them up. He’d leave silly voice-mail messages for them, he would burp his stepdaughter’s full name, and once, he brought his elderly grandmother to a restaurant where the wait staff dressed up as aliens. Lori Ann said he had a comedian’s gift for perfect timing.
“He was always smiling, always happy, always happy-go-lucky,” his brother said. “He didn’t let much bother him. . . . His attitude was: I don’t change my act for anyone.“
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1965 — February 20, 2003
Jason R. Morton, 38, a lifelong West Greenwich resident, was 6 feet tall, weighed 200 pounds and proudly worked as a laborer for 20 years. But the same man who loved to pull the helmet off his head when he drove his Harley-Davidson across the Connecticut line also allowed his two daughters to paint his toenails with permanent markers, stick his hair up in plastic clips and snap plastic earrings from a Potato-Head doll on his ears.
“He was a wonderful father who cherished his children, his parents, his family and friends,” said his wife, Marie G. (Pellicio) Morton, as she sat in the home her husband had helped to build. After daughters Ashley, 16, and Kaitlin, 12, were born, the couple staggered their work schedules, so one of them would always be home. They nicknamed Ashley “Apples” because she smelled so good, and Jason’s best friend, Tom Barnett, nicknamed Kaitlin “Oranges” because the two were so different, but equally sweet as babies.
Jason worked as a fireproof-batch mixer for Century Drywall in Providence, and before that at H. Carr & Sons. He also worked as a shellfisherman, owned the former Morton Land Clearing and Tree Service and was a member of the Massachusetts Laborers Union Local 223. He’d get up as early as 4 some mornings, while Marie worked the night shift as a custodian at Exeter-West Greenwich schools.
Three years ago, the couple talked about buying the girls a go-cart or a computer. Jason, recalling what fun he had racing dirt bikes as a kid, bought the go-cart and delighted in clearing a four-feet-wide path around the house that the girls could drive on.
When the go-cart broke down, Jason felt so badly the repairs took longer than expected that he raced out and bought the girls the computer, too. The marriage had hit hard times recently, and Jason moved across the road to a relative’s house a few months ago. The girls slept over the Wednesday of school vacation week and spent Thursday with their dad, browsing in the Dollar Store and grabbing lunch at D’Angelo’s in Coventry.
Tom Barnett had visited that day, as usual, and the lifelong friends decided to go to The Station, a favorite hang-out, because they had free tickets to that night’s show. The Mortons and the Barnetts say they’ve heard reports that Jason and Tom were by the front door when the fire started, but stayed to pass people out through windows.
“They were both so strong and dependable,” Marie said. “They truly died as heroes. They never thought of themselves or the people they left behind, because they never thought they’d be leaving anyone behind.”
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1979 — February 20, 2003
Jason R. Sylvester was part of a tight-knit Coventry family. Jason, 25, worked with his father and younger brother at Sylvester Sheet Metal Co., in West Warwick, the family’s heating and air conditioning business. After graduating from Coventry High School in 1996, he worked at a few local retail stores but soon decided he’d rather follow in his father’s footsteps. “He liked the closeness of being with his dad all the time,” said Jason’s mother, Jane. “They got along great. We are all very close.”
Besides his family, the other great love in Jason’s life was music. He was a fan of everything from country to oldies to techno, and the tunes from his stereo often filled the Sylvester home. As she stood in his neatly kept room, where he had his stereo and an extensive CD collection, Jane Sylvester remembered her son as a quiet young man who “wore his heart on his sleeve.” “He was the greatest kid you ever wanted to meet,” she said. “He was so kind and polite — he was the love of my life.”
There are many who will miss Jason — including Armand Ethier, who lives across the street and watched him grow up. “He was a good kid,” Ethier said. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Jason loved going to rock concerts, and had been to The Station a few times before Feb. 20. When he wasn’t listening to music or reading up on his favorite bands, Jason would paint and build models during his free time, his mother said. While recalling Jason’s personality, his mother used the words “pleasant, easy-going and laid-back.” “How do you describe your own son?” she asked. “You just love him with all your heart.”
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November 5, 1970 — February 20, 2003
When Jeff Rader was a teenager, his mother would come home to find the house full of kids playing music. Jeff got his first drum kit at 13, and at one point had as many as three sets, says his mother, Jeannie Rader. She had to soundproof his room. Jeff, 32, didn’t grow up in a musical family, but he fell in love with rock ‘n’ roll at an early age. “Jeff always wanted to march to a different drummer and be his own person,” his mother says.
Jeff became a professional roadie in the mid-’90s, traveling with bands like Great White and Tesla. It was a lifestyle his mother didn’t understand. But immediately after the tragedy at The Station, the Rader family began to receive phone calls and e-mails from musicians and fellow roadies who had known Jeff. Jeannie Rader was amazed at how many people loved and respected her son. “It made us in the family feel very good,” she says.
Jeff was at the Great White concert as a fan, with his girlfriend of six months, Becky Shaw, 24, of Warwick. Jeff and Becky met at a previous Great White concert, his mother says. Becky is why Jeff, who lived in Danville, Calif., with his mother, visited Rhode Island as often as he could. Becky’s roommate, Megan C. Connelly, 24, of Warwick, said the couple were crazy about each other. When they were apart, Jeff would take his video camera on mountain hikes and send the tapes to Becky. He’d also send her photographs, including a beach picture with “Wish you were here” written in the sand.
The night of the fire, Jeannie Rader got a call from Becky’s roommate at 5:30 a.m. California time. She turned on the television news and saw her son. In the news footage, she watched him turn and point others toward the exit. He was one of the first to react. “He knew the club, he knew the band,” she says. She’s heard accounts from survivors that Jeff made it out of the club, but went back in for Becky. Both were lost. In the days after the fire, Jeannie Rader said, Jeff’s family has been comforted that their “free spirit” had found his place in life. “The last couple months have been the happiest he’s ever been in his life,” she said. His promotions-and-merchandising business, Iwear, was taking off, she said. And he was in love. “That’s our one consolation in all this,” Jeannie Rader said. “He was doing exactly what he wanted to do, and he was happy.”
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December 9, 1969 — February 20, 2003
Jeffrey W. Martin knew what it meant to work hard, deciding at a young age that he wanted to be a lawyer and then paying his way through law school at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. He spent his summers during college working at the Boston law office of his older cousin Robert L. Martin, who remembers Jeff as a motivated student and adventurous traveler. “He was really inquisitive about life,” Robert Martin said. “He was really getting started.”
Jeff, 33, earned the respect of his colleagues at John Hancock Insurance Co. in Boston, where he worked for four years, providing legal counsel for the firm’s trading and brokerage subsidiaries. His supervisor, John Morin, described Jeff as an affable future leader with a knack for instilling confidence in others, and as someone who could work with anyone.
Heavy-metal music allowed Jeff an outlet from the pressure he put on himself, his relatives said. Great White was one of his favorite groups, and he had photographs of himself with the band’s guitarist, Ty Longley, who also died in the fire. “He had personal notes from the band,” said David Bloom, husband of Martin’s stepmother, Dru Bloom, of Nashville, TN. “He just loved that music.”
Morin said he found a list of concert dates through June in Jeff’s desk that included the Feb. 20 concert at The Station and another Great White show on Feb. 23. Jeff and a friend went to The Station. The friend made it out of the fire. Jeff drove more than an hour from his new apartment in Melrose, Mass., to the West Warwick club, but it wasn’t the farthest he had traveled for a show: he spent his vacations following bands throughout the country and across Europe, and hiking and mountaineering.
Born in Boston, Jeff grew up in Massachusetts and spent his teenage years in southern California. He earned his undergraduate degree in political science at University of California at Santa Cruz. He was a Thanksgiving fixture at his stepmother’s in Nashville, where he showed his lighter side, cajoling relatives into joining him on late-night forays to the grocery store for Milano cookies and Little Debbie snack cakes and on trips to used-CD stores for his favorite music.
Besides his cousin and stepmother, Jeff leaves his mother, Suzanne Fox, of Carson City, Nev., and his brother, Stephen Martin, of California. He was the son of the late Kenyon Martin, a nationally known mime.
At the memorial service at John Hancock’s corporate headquarters, Morin told the family that he would always remember Jeff’s bright promise. “Any time I see another young person starting out in his career, I’ll think of him,” Morin said. “I can’t help but make comparisons.”
David Bloom said all the hard work had started to pay off for Jeff. “He was reaching a point in his life where he was really happy, and that was a good thing,” Bloom said. “He was a kid on his way up.”
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June 21, 1979 — February 20, 2003
John M. Longiaru, 23, of Johnston, was a well-liked young man who was president of his junior class in high school, a member of the student council and as a high school senior was listed in Who’s Who Among American High School Students.
“He read everything,” recalls Vincent LaFazia, the former long-time recreation director in Johnston, whoworked with John’s father, John A. Longiaru. John M. Longiaru also had a flair for the unusual. For his graduation picture in the 1996 high school yearbook, he wore a medieval costume, reflecting his interest in that period.
When it came time for graduation, a problem arose for John, who had a degenerative bone disease. The stage the students were to file across to receive their diplomas was not accessible for his wheelchair. After more than 100 of his classmates signed a petition saying they would not walk across the stage unless John could cross it, too, school officials made sure that he could. The cheers for him were among the loudest any student received that day.
John also made the news with a run-in with state Traffic Court officials. At age 16, he received his driver’s license, after learning to drive in a car outfitted with special hand controls. But 10 weeks later, the Traffic Court suspended his license based on “physical fitness,” though he’d never had an accident or so much as a ticket. “He was eminently qualified to drive,” says state Sen. Joseph Polisena, who helped John get his license back. “They issued him the license; there was no reason to take it away.”
“He was a role model, especially for those who didn’t have a disability; he didn’t want any special treatment,” Polisena said. The experience of having had to fight for equal treatment stayed with John. “He was always for the underdog,” LaFazia said. John attended Eastern Connecticut State College and Rhode Island College.
He had been working for an independent living center in Pawtucket, helping secure donations of equipment, including wheelchairs and crutches for those with disabilities.
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August 11, 1967 — February 20, 2003
Joseph E. Rossi, 35, of Pawtucket, called each member of his extended family on Sept. 11, 2001: he was driving his truck just blocks from the twin towers in New York, and didn’t want his parents, sister, or stepchildren to worry about him. “He was a big teddy bear,” explains his sister, Lisa Costa.
Although his job as a long-haul trucker kept him traveling around New England and the Mid-Atlantic States, he would visit his five stepchildren each week, and they kept in touch by cell phone as well, according to his oldest stepdaughter, Carrie Pardey of Pawtucket. “I keep calling his cell phone to hear his voice on the voice mail,” says Pardey. She hopes to hear the words he used to close every conversation: “I love you, I’ll see you soon, and give that baby a kiss for me.” She knows she won’t hear the phrase again, but says she still gives her son, Cameron, 2, kisses from his “Pappy Joe.”
Joe was always a presence on birthdays and holidays, and last stopped by Pardey’s apartment on Valentine’s Day, bearing cards, flowers and chocolates for everybody. “He would give, and give, and never expect anything in return,” Pardey said. On his own birthday, he objected to gifts. Despite his protests, Pardey gave him a gift certificate to Strawberries “because he was such a music lover.”
When not at concerts, Joe would do “lots of family things,” like taking his stepchildren camping in New Hampshire or on picnics at Slater Park. When weather permitted, he spent Sundays on the golf course with his father, Louis Rossi of Pawtucket. And, no matter what the excursion, Pardey says, “he always knew how to make you laugh, no matter what mood you were in.” He brought that sense of humor with him to his work, at Messier Trucking in Cumberland. Dispatcher Paul Vanasse remembers keeping in touch with “Joe40” as he drove his 18-wheeler. Over the radio, Joe was a “dispatcher’s nightmare,” letting Vanessa and others know each humorous detail of his trip. He was dedicated to the job, coming in during evenings just to say hello. He made one such visit the night of Feb. 20, even though he was on vacation. He stopped in at the trucking company just before heading to The Station with his friend Dennis Smith. Both men died in the fire.
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November 4, 1966 — February 20, 2003
Jude Henault sensed when friends were feeling down or struggling with a problem, and to lighten their load she would often send them funny or inspiring e-mails. Friends described the mother of three, who looked younger than her 37 years, as sensitive and spiritual. “If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it,” she wrote to Dorothy Everett in the last e-mail her friend received from her.
“I felt she was my friend, not my supervisor,” Everett said as she described the woman she worked with at Foxwoods Resort Casino for the last several years. “You felt the first time she walked into the room, you could talk to her. She never stood on ceremony. And she had the prettiest blue eyes.”
“You could just ask her anything, and she’d do it for you,” said coworker Ellen Scott. “You could count on her lifting up your spirits.” Jude was a dedicated employee who sometimes brought her two younger children, Rachel, 12, and Andrew, 10, to the income audit department when she stopped by on her days off to do even more work.
Jude also worked in the general cashier and coin department for several years before joining the income audit office as an accountant about two years ago. “Some people are aggressive when they start a job, then they level off,” said coworker Fred Barning. “She never leveled off. She was dedicated to getting it right.”
Photographs of her three children and examples of their artwork adorned her office. Jude felt proud when she helped pay for her oldest daughter’s wedding last fall, when Angela, 19, married Michael Boggs, of New London, Conn.
She loved to cook seafood and bake homemade bread in the Lisbon, Conn., home she shared with her boyfriend, Samuel A. Miceli Jr., and her two youngest children. They lived near a pond, and Jude enjoyed the wildlife there, particularly a swan she and her family helped nurse when it was injured. Jude and Sam liked live music. They won tickets to the Great White show at The Station that Thursday night from a New London radio station.
Both died in the blaze.
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1966 — February 20, 2003
Judith I. Manzo, 37, built her life around her children, Anthony, 12, and Brianna, 10, said her ex-husband, Anthony. “She gave those kids everything — Playstation, Nintendo, all that,” he said. “The money went to the kids; she just wanted them to be happy.”
Anthony said Judy was a “cheerleader mother” for the North Providence Jets, a youth football team in town. “She got water for the kids, permission slips, anything the [cheerleading] coach wanted,” he said. Brianna had been involved with the cheerleaders for three years. She also had a dog, a Shih Tzu named Daisy, and a cat named Heckle.
Anthony said the couple met when they were 18, at the Club Promenade in Providence. “We were together just about every day,” he said. She graduated from Attleboro High School in 1983, then went to cosmetology school. She worked in the field until about six months ago, when she got a job as an administrative assistant at First Choice Medical Staffing in East Providence.
Karen Brown, Manzo’s friend and manager in the East Providence office, described her as “a loving, caring person.” Although they were divorced, Anthony said he and Judy lived together in the small bungalow she bought three years ago on Elm Street, in the town’s Lymansville section. They had previously lived in Pawtucket.
Manzo said Judy liked clubs and ’80s music. “She liked a lot of those bands, like Great White,” he said. Brown said Judy went to The Station with a friend, who had bought the tickets for the show. The children were home with their father.
Brown said she will miss her friend, an excellent employee who she said can’t be replaced. “Every single person — and I’m not saying this because she’s gone — every single person who met Judy loved Judy,” she said.
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January 1, 1962 — February 20, 2003
Karla Jean Bagtaz appreciated things that were big and noisy. Things like rock concerts. And monster trucks — those pickups with ridiculously oversized wheels, splashy paint schemes and nicknames like “BigFoot.” “Anything that was large and loud,” said Ms. Bagtaz’s close friend Natalia Vargas, of Stoughton, Mass. “She liked people and things that were larger than life.”
People remember Ms. Bagtaz, 41, of Brockton, as a caring, warm woman who liked spending time with the children of her friends and family. She had a talent for lifting someone up on a bad day. “When she sees someone is at their lowest low, she is right there, picking them up,” said Vargas, who met Ms. Bagtaz in first grade.
Ms. Bagtaz had a distinctive laugh and a rascally nature. Last summer, she gave Vargas’s son $100 on his birthday. But she made him work for it. Each of the dollar bills was folded up inside a tiny capsule, the same sort of plastic container used in vending machines for children’s toys. “She was always up to something,” Vargas said.
Ms. Bagtaz lived most of her life in Stoughton. She graduated from Stoughton High School in 1980. In recent years, she worked as a legal assistant for a lawyer in Randolph, Michael Maniscalco. In recent weeks, she had started a new job for Miracle Mortgage in Dedham.
Meanwhile, she sold Avon fragrances and other products, and she spent several nights a week waiting tables at Lastoria Italian Bar and Grill in Stoughton. “Everybody liked her,” said the restaurant’s assistant manager, Mickey Lastoria. When she was off the clock, Ms. Bagtaz liked to escape. “She had an adventurous side to her, without a doubt,” Vargas recalled.
Ms. Bagtaz often had concert tickets to hand out. Late one Sunday night in January, Vargas found herself at The Living Room in Providence. And she didn’t like the music much. It was her friend’s thought that counted. “I did it for her — she loved it,” Vargas said. “I know if there is a heaven, she made it there with a bunch of people who have the same interests as her.”
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1977 — February 20, 2003
About a year ago, Katie O’Donnell was over at Renée Bourque’s house when they got to talking about the time in the late 1980s that they had these huge crushes on New Kids On The Block. It made them laugh to think they were that obsessed with a group that was so junior high. Then one of them said that, nevertheless, the New Kids sure were cute, and at that, they put on the group’s old music and began to dance, using all the ’80s moves, just to be silly, because even in their mid-20s, that’s how Renée and Katie liked to spend time together.
The two became best friends at St. Mary Academy-Bay View in the seventh grade. They were best friends still. Renée remembers Katie as a bit of a tomboy at age 12, no surprise since she had five brothers. And a sister, too. It was this big Irish family, and starting early on, Katie told Renée she wanted to have a ton of kids herself. Her plan was to get married in her 20s, and start a family right away.
Katie eventually began working at Riverside Pediatrics, in part because she loved being around kids. She continued there after college and became a full-time administrative assistant, right up until recently. She was 26. By the time the two were in high school, Katie wasn’t a tomboy anymore. She and Renée got into makeup and clothes, though neither minded the dress code at Bay View. It meant you could sleep a little later, roll out of bed and right into your plaid skirt.
The two went through everything together; boys, music, dreams. They went through a hair-coloring phase, which Katie’s dad didn’t love. Along with other friends, they liked dressing up in funny ways and taking Polaroid pictures of each other. Both got into theater. Bay View had a big Broadway-style revue every year with more than 100 students, and Katie was a regular cast member. She loved the dancing part of the shows. She had pursued Irish step dancing since she was little, winning prizes at it and continuing into her 20s.
Whenever there was a forecast of a snowstorm big enough to cancel school, Katie would go to Renée’s beforehand and make a night of it. She’d put on her favorite flannel PJs, and the two would watch late movies. Katie always brought along a tattered “blanket” she’d had since childhood. Katie went to Green Mountain in Vermont, where she played rugby, and later to Becker College in Worcester.
She liked being near home. She talked a lot about how tight her family was. “Actually,” says Renée, “her mom’s the best friend. I’m number two.” Sometimes, when alone, Renée will talk aloud to Katie, asking her to help her through this, or even through smaller day-to-day challenges. “There’s nobody that will ever be my best friend like that,” Renée said.
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1969 — February 20, 2003
As a teenager, Keith A. Mancini dreamed of being a rock ‘n’ roll star. Weaned on Black Sabbath, KISS and Poison, he grew his blond hair long and played bass in several bands after leaving West Warwick High School. He even met Joe Jackson in Las Vegas. The Cranston musician sent his booming bass lines through an amplifier in his Broad Street apartment and scribbled lyrics in a notebook.
His first band was called Nightfall. “He was very passionate about his music,” said Craig Mancini, Keith’s older brother. “More than anything he wanted to be a rock star. He wanted to cut a record.” So when Keith’s latest band, Fathead, grabbed the opening act for Great White, the band members — including Keith’s cousin Steven — were excited. “They thought they might get discovered,” Craig said.
Keith first embraced the heavy-metal world of power chords and platform shoes as a teenage boy on the Cranston-Warwick line. He went to Bishop Hendricken High School for two years, but switched to West Warwick to graduate with his friends. He played the piano briefly, but learned to play bass and read music from a Mount Pleasant High School teacher.
For years, he worked at his father’s store, Continental Bait & Tackle, selling hunting and fishing equipment. “He was a good salesman,” recalled his father, Anthony. “He charmed the people.” Three years ago, Keith got a warehouse job with the Rhode Island Novelty Co. in Johnston. And he joined the company softball team as a pitcher. “He was a great guy,” said Ralph Tedeschi, his supervisor.
But his first love was music. He joined the rock band Skyhigh and played often at The Station. There he met guitarist Steven R. Mancini, a second cousin. Keith left Skyhigh to join Steven’s band, Fathead. All of the band members contributed to Fathead’s sound, a mix of Bad Company, Creed, Jimi Hendrix and the blues.
“Keith would come up with a bass line out of nowhere,” said Tom Conte, Fathead’s singer. “He added so much to the band, both in his music and in the show he put on. The Station was the only place we played,” Conte said. “It had a nice stage and the sound system was the best. We always brought in a good crowd. They rushed the stage and it was a great feeling. It would last for days.”
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1974 — February 20, 2003
Sarah Rose Lapierre, a cute baby girl weighing 6 pounds, 12 ounces, was born March 3 in Worcester Memorial Hospital. It’s a safe bet that her father, Keith R. Lapierre, would have been on cloud nine. “He would be so thrilled,” Keith’s mother said the next day. “I’ll never forget when Ryan was born, he called us on a cell phone. He said, ‘Pop, it’s a boy.’ ”
The big extended family that Keith, 29, of Worcester, leaves behind includes his wife, Tammy; his parents, Karen and Richard Lapierre, of Oxford, Mass.; his son, Ryan, 22 months; and now little Sarah Rose. Sarah takes her middle name from her great grandmother, Rose MacKay. “She is absolutely beautiful. We were there like minutes after she was born,” Karen Lapierre said. “We’re crying tears of joy,” Richard said.
By all accounts, Keith Lapierre was curious and animated, with an interest in things that could empty a library, and a smile that could brighten a room. He was close to his family. He and his mother worked together at the A.G. Edwards branch in Worcester, where he was a stockbroker and she is a financial assistant.
When he wasn’t spending his lunch hour working out with a friend at the gym, Keith and his mother would brown-bag it together in Worcester Common Park.
A year ago, he left A.G. Edwards and returned to school. He earned a teaching certificate and, in December, started working as a substitute teacher at Worcester’s Accelerated Learning Lab.
Keith made the career change in part because he wanted to have the same school vacations and holidays as Tammy, a kindergarten teacher. Another big reason, Karen Lapierre said, was that Keith was a spiritual person who didn’t find work as a stockbroker fulfilling. She said a priest in his parish, Father Joseph Coonan, called Keith “a 90-year-old guru.” “In the brokerage,” she said, “it was always business.”
Keith Lapierre was an eclectic music fan. He had played high school baseball and football, served in the Marine Corps Reserve, and was still intrigued by life’s possibilities.
A month before he died, he bought himself an electric guitar and began taking lessons. “He said he did not want to go through life saying, ‘I should have done this, I should have done that,’ ” his mother said.
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August 31, 1962 — February 20, 2003
Kelly L. Vieira’s calendar at work was covered in sticky-note reminders for her daughter Chandree’s summer wedding that she was helping plan. Kelly centered recent family vacations around her daughter Crystle’s basketball tournaments in Florida, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. “She traveled all over, wherever her daughter went,” said Kelly’s father, John Richmond. “She just enjoyed following her children and encouraging them.”
One of Kelly’s happiest moments was when Crystle scored 37 points last month to lead West Warwick High School’s team to a 72-60 win over Warwick Veterans Memorial High School. Friends and family agree that Kelly Vieira, 40, of Silverwood Lane in West Warwick, was dedicated to her daughters, always putting them first. She looked forward to things slowing down following Crystle’s high school graduation and Chandree’s wedding.
“This was going to be her first year when she would use her vacations for her,” said coworker Doreen L. Gulley. Kelly used to say, “After that, now it’s time for Scott and I.” Kelly and her husband, Scott, were high school sweethearts. She was a majorette at Case High School, in Swansea, and he was a student at Durfee High School, in Fall River. They both attended school sporting events. On Valentine’s Day this year, they celebrated their 23rd wedding anniversary.
Kelly went to beautician school after high school to become a hairdresser like her late mother, Sandra Richmond. After a few years as a hairdresser, she went back to school, to the Community College of Rhode Island, and became a physical therapist assistant. For the last six years, she had worked at Orthopedic Associates, in Cranston. The Station was a family hangout for the Vieiras, who lived about a mile from the club. Scott occasionally helped out at the club, and was working security the night of the Great White concert. He escaped uninjured. Kelly died March 1 at Boston Shriners Hospital. Photographs taken by someone inside the club moments before the fire started show Kelly standing near the stage, friends said. “She loved rock ‘n’ roll,” Gulley said. “That was her music.”
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February 16, 1966 — February 20, 2003
Kevin Anderson was a guy happily stuck in the 1980s. He collected hundreds of CDs of his favorite bands from that era, including Metallica, Def Leppard and Great White “We used to go to the pawn shops and Wal-Mart and buy them,” says Dave Penny, one of Kevin’s many “best friends. “Kevin, 37, was so into the 1980s that he dressed from that period and wore long hair. “My kids called him ‘Uncle Dude,’ ” says his sister Sue Sylvia. “One night he was in a club and a guy came up to him and said, ‘You ought to get out of the ’80s,’ ” she says.
Lori Lacques, a former girlfriend, explains Kevin’s fascination with the era: “It was his teenage years.” Kevin also loved his white Chevrolet Corsica. “You could eat off the inside of that car,” his sister says. As a child, she says, Kevin liked bicycles — “He was always fixing them up.”
Kevin was on a crew that cleaned air ducts in restaurants, but he had to leave that work because of a heart ailment. “He got tired because of his heart problem,” Dave Penny says. He and Kevin grew up together in Warwick, where they attended Pilgrim High School. “I loved the guy like a brother,” he says.
Kevin had an 11-year-old son, Kevin Gage. The boy’s mother, whom he never married, calls him “an awesome guy.” “We had our differences, but he was my best friend,” Melissa Bloomingburgh says. “When I needed a friend to talk to, he was always the one I called.”
Just two weeks before the fire, Kevin moved into a new apartment on Pilgrim Drive that he was fixing up so he and his son could get together to listen to music and play video games. That weekend was supposed to be the first time they would be at the apartment together.
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March 23, 1965 — February 20, 2003
It had taken him years, but Kevin J. Dunn finally had everything he wanted. He had a wife he loved, the child he’d always dreamed of, a full-time job he enjoyed, and most importantly, he was sober. “He had just turned his life around,” said his mother, Teresa Dunn, of Quincy, Mass. “He hadn’t had a drink since May 12, 1995 . . . when he’d have a problem, he’d call up, and say he just wanted to hear my voice, and then things would be all better. He was very happy.”
Mr. Dunn, 37, of Attleboro, had bounced around from job to job and from place to place after graduating from Quincy High School. He struggled with alcohol for much of that time, and spent many months in homeless shelters across the state, his mother said.
Then, eight years ago, with the help of friends and family, he found Alcoholics Anonymous. He confronted his own problem and then he became a beacon for others, a helping hand who would use his own experiences as proof that the addiction could be beaten.
Dozens of the people he’d helped came to his funeral to pay their respects. “As far as the outpouring of people who came to the wake and the funeral, it was heart-wrenching,” his mother said. “People from the [AA] meetings would turn to me and say he helped them.”
Her son loved roller-coasters, the music of Aerosmith, and all sports — he was particularly looking forward to seeing the Red Sox on the Patriots Day holiday in April. For the last three years, he had been a sheet metal worker with Environmental Systems Inc., in Attleboro.
Kevin married Eileen McCarthy in September 2001, and the two had a daughter, Joanna, in February 2002. The entire family came together early last month to celebrate Joanna’s first birthday, and his mother said Kevin seemed genuinely happy. He’d told her for years that all he really wanted was a loving wife and child, and a stable, steady life. She believes he’d found it.
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March 14, 1972 — February 20, 2003
Kevin R. Washburn’s quiet, introspective personality belied his splashy hard-rock image. Long-haired and usually clad in a leather jacket, Kevin, 30, was kind and easygoing, reluctant to draw attention to himself. “He was a quiet guy, but very friendly,” says his sister Sharon Washburn, sitting in the living room of the house in Franklin, Mass., where Kevin lived with his mother, Rina. “Everybody just really loved Kevin.”
“We’ve gotten calls from his old friends and girlfriends, people he worked with, even from people he went to kindergarten with. It’s been one right after the other,” said his mother, her eyes welling with tears. “It’s been just amazing. It makes me glad to get the calls, makes me feel like I did a good job.”Kevin, who worked for four years in the shipping department of SourceOne, a national distribution center in Hopkinton, Mass., had a separate circle of friends for each of his favorite activities: rock concerts, playing music, watching the Boston Bruins or NASCAR. He went to the Great White show with his longtime best friend Michael Stefani of North Kingstown, whoescaped the fire.
Kevin, a 1990 graduate of Franklin High School, had an associate’s degree from New England Institute of Technology. He loved art and played electric guitar, got tattoos and named his yellow Labrador puppy “Harley” because strangers sometimes called out, “Hey, Harley” when he went out. “I used to joke around with him, saying ‘But Kevin, you don’t even ride a motorcycle,’ ” his sister said.
He would sometimes spend all day drawing finely detailed pen-and-ink illustrations. A handsomely-sketched picture of a cheetah standing in tall, waving grass, one of his works, is displayed in the living room.
“I thought that he bought it at first,” his mother says with pride. She said her son was planning on going back to school to study design. Because he spent much of his time concentrating on just-so details, Kevin would argue playfully when someone was imprecise. “Sometimes I’d call home and ask to talk to Mom. Kevin would ask, ‘Who’s calling?’ ” recalls his sister. “When I’d say, ‘C’mon, it’s me,’ I’d hear him yell over to her, ‘Mom, there’s a “me” that wants to talk to you.’ He’d do stuff like that all the time.”
“He would always tease,” says his mother, smiling. “He was so silly sometimes.”
Kevin was the best of buddies with Sharon’s son, Kamaron. A dutiful uncle to the 11-year-old, he had been teaching Kamaron how to play chords on the guitar. And although Kevin was never really into sports growing up, he grew to love playing in the co-ed Franklin softball league that Sharon, who lives in town, organized about three years ago. “He’d say, ‘Ma, I wish you could have seen the game today. I got a double; you should have seen this double,’ ” Rina recalls. “He was so excited. . . . ” “Oh, he was so good,” she says. “Even as a baby he was always smiling and sweet.”
January 13, 1966 — February 20, 2003
Kristen Leigh McQuarrie’s giggle was contagious. Her coworkers at the Branches Restaurant at Foxwoods Resort Casino say they’re going to miss that laugh. The staff of the country-style restaurant in the resort’s Two Trees Inn have been her family for the last seven years. Many of the wait staff are single mothers, like Ms. McQuarrie. “We knew she didn’t have much family, so we took over as family for her,” said Rayna Reynolds, of Voluntown, Conn.
Ms. McQuarrie, 37, grew up in Lynn and Saugus, Mass. Her relationship with her mother was strained, and she didn’t know her father. “Her mother would never tell her who her dad was,” Reynolds said. “She was trying to find herself and that one little piece was missing.”
Ms. McQuarrie had lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Coventry, but she moved from Coventry to Ledyard a couple of weeks before she died. She is survived by her children, David A. McQuarrie Jr., 19, of Coventry, and Melissa McQuarrie, 18, of Pawtucket. Her ex-husband, David A. McQuarrie Sr., of Peabody, Mass., still sends her anniversary cards on their wedding date, according to Reynolds and Ms. McQuarrie’s former mother-in-law. “They were friends,” said Agnes McQuarrie.
Kristen was a fun-loving person who loved concerts and kept a display of all her ticket stubs. “I think she’s been to every [concert] there ever was,” Agnes McQuarrie said. Reynolds said she and Ms. McQuarrie attended several concerts together, including Hootie & the Blowfish and the Goo Goo Dolls. “She loved her music,” Reynolds said.
Her friends described her as youthful, energetic and outgoing. When listening to a story, Ms. McQuarrie would interject with a dramatic “Wow,” “No, way,” or “Oh my God.” “She was very expressive,” said Kimberly A. Blais, a fellow waitress who lives in Baltic, Conn. One friend said, “She lived like a rock star and she died like a rock star.”
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April 12, 1964 — February 20, 2003
Kristine Carbone, 38, would put spice into anyone’s day. She loved baking and cooking, and was always ready to whip something up for her friends, or even for those she did not know. Every dish that Kristine made was unique.
“Nothing was ever plain with Kristine,” her sister, Patti, says. Every Friday, Kristine would send her legendary goodies to Brookfield Engineering, where her boyfriend, Claude Schlieff, worked. “She would get e-mails that said, ‘We haven’t met you yet, but we love you. Keep the cookies coming,’ ” Patti says.
Kristine’s cooking won praise from afar as well; she recently won first place in an informal chili cook-off. “She was just a wonderful, giving person, and she brought people together,” Patti said. Even when they were young, the two sisters did not fight. “She was my Krissy.”
Kristine was a salesperson at Heritage Salmon Co. in Canton, where she made even her clients feel like good friends. “She seemed to create a personal touch with all of them,” coworker Marianne Sheehan says. “Everyone that’s called, even over the phone, they just felt terrible, because they knew her personally.”
Sheehan said it’s still difficult to walk by Kristine’s desk, which holds stuffed animals, cards and photographs of her boyfriend and her cat, Mooy. “She loved that cat; she had pictures of him up all over,” Sheehan said. Kristine had a second cat, Frito, whom she took in, rescuing him from a factory, where he was born.
“She’d lift everyone’s spirits when they were down; it’s just the way she was. It’s hard to explain — everybody was ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie’; she just made everybody feel good,” Sheehan said. Kristine loved crosses and angels and often received figurines as gifts. “She believed in angels,” Patti said.
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1971 — February 20, 2003
Her life in Pembroke, Mass., focused on her kids, 6-year-old Jake and 3-year-old Jared. And she seemed to understand children well. “She was like a big kid. She loved the Looney Tunes” cartoon characters, says her brother, Michael Paterno, of Milford, Mass. “One of the things she used to do was draw Tweety Bird — drawing cartoons and doing crafts with the kids. “Neighbors always saw her around the yard, out making sledding runs. Family was always her top priority.”
Laura also loved cats. She brought one home from a local shelter and named him Petie, Michael said. “I miss her greatly. I always want to make sure I have the same attitude toward my two children.”
Laura helped build the Hobomock Elementary School’s first wooden playground, another example of her commitment to kids. She was a claim representative at Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Rockland, Mass., often working night shifts to support her children, Michael said. She lived in the house where she grew up.
Laura was dating Shawn Sweet, of Pembroke, who was with her at The Station and also died in the fire. “They were dating for like two years. They both had the same passion for the same type of music. They spent a lot of time together,” Michael said.
Carol Dodge, who lives across from Laura on West Elm Street, said the small community of Pembroke is devastated by the loss of two people. Laura’s little daughter played with her daughter, Dodge said. “They have been friends forever,” she said.
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May 10, 1967 — February 20, 2003
Laureen M. (DeSantis) Beauchaine’s greatest love was her three children. From trips to the beach to rollerskating outings, nothing was too good for her kids. She even bought them a Chihuahua, named Cocoa. And they loved her. That’s why it breaks her brother-in-law’s heart when he sees his niece, 5-year-old
Ashley, hold up a picture of her mom. “The little one keeps asking about her mom,” Dwayne Beauchaine, of West Warwick, says. Born in Providence, Laurie had lived in Cranston briefly and moved to West Warwick 25 years ago. She and Ray F. Beauchaine Jr. used to hang out at parties together as teenagers. They married about 15 years ago and had three children — Christopher R., 15, Ray F. III, 7, and Ashley N., 5.
“She was very family-oriented,” said Julia Silcaggio, her sister-in-law. “She was a great mother and proud of her marriage. She always told everyone how long they had been together.” Laurie, 35, would pick up Dwayne and Julia’s daughter, along with her three children, and head to the beach for picnics every day in the summer. She always made sure the children were happy, Julia said.
Laurie used to deliver The Providence Journal in the morning, so she could be home with her children during the day. She had also worked as a jewelry setter for Gianni Manufacturing, in Providence, for seven years. Laurie and Ray both loved ’80s rock and often went to The Station. Ray was critically injured in the fire.
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August 25, 1981 — February 20, 2003
If you knew her, you loved her. The fact that she was loved by all is what set 21-year-old Leigh Ann Moreau apart, her family and friends say. It may have been the radiant, infectious smile that initially drew the many, many people she counted among her friends.
Or the way she lived her life with passion, urging others to “follow your heart.” It was by that credo that Leigh Ann lived her life, said her mother, Jean. Even when her family disagreed with some of her choices, Leigh Ann would gently remind them that she had to follow her heart. As a testament to her belief in that motto, Leigh Ann had a tattoo on her lower back of Chinese symbols that expressed the phrase.
Leigh Ann — who was known affectionately as Leigh Lu, Leigh-Leigh, Leigh Ro or just Leigh — lived many years in Pawtucket and moved to Stadden Street in Providence in 1989. She attended Our Lady of Consolation School in Pawtucket, St. Patrick School in Providence and Classical High School, where she made the honor roll.
Last December, she received her bachelor’s degree in art therapy from Springfield College, in Springfield, Mass.; she would have received her diploma in ceremonies this spring. She had already applied to and been accepted by several graduate schools, her family said. Leigh Ann planned to pursue a career in art therapy. She dreamed of helping to heal people with physical or mental ailments by encouraging them to express themselves through art. A dark-haired young woman and middle child, Leigh Ann lived the way she painted — truly and vibrantly, with deep appreciation for the simplicity and beauty of life, her family said.
While art therapy was her chosen career, her love for the arts took many forms, including that of music. Last summer, she celebrated Bob Dylan’s return to the Newport Folk Festival by attending the event with another Dylan fan — her father, Richard. “It was through her love of music that she truly connected with those whom she loved,” Jean Moreau said.
Leigh Ann had gone to The Station nightclub with a group of friends, only some of whom survived the fire. Her family believes that Leigh Ann remains with them, in another form. “Every time you hear a dog bark, a bird chirp or some random critter scurry, you will know she is there, helping that critter through whatever woes it is experiencing, just as she will continue to do with all of us,” her mother said.
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1960 — February 20, 2003
Benjamin and Linda Suffoletto would have celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary on March 3. The couple, both 43, were the parents of an 18-year-old son, Zachary. Benjamin Joseph Suffoletto Jr. was raised in Woonsocket and graduated from Woonsocket High School and the Hall Institute in Pawtucket. He was an architect for Vision III Architects in Providence for four years, and had also worked for McKenzie Architects in Pawtucket.
Linda Dee (Sousa) Suffoletto, a 1977 graduate of Cumberland High School, was a revenue officer for the state Department of Labor and Training for the last 11 years. The Suffolettos were members of the Connecticut-based Starlight Trucker Club.
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1961 — February 20, 2003
Lisa Maria D’Andrea adored the summer season. It gave her plenty of opportunities to garden and walk along the waters near her home on Blanding Avenue in Barrington, sifting the sand for seashells and unique rocks. She brought nature into her home as well. Potted plants thrive along window sills, complementing the many treasures found during Lisa’s walks.
A framed picture of Ozzy Osbourne, angel statues, Hello Kitty paraphernalia, snow globes, and penguin figurines are scattered about. “There are so many things from our childhood here,” said her youngest brother, Peter D’Andrea of Los Angeles, walking through her home. “She had a tremendous zest for living,” added her sister, Paula D’Andrea, also of Los Angeles. “We’re all proud of her. . . .”
Lisa was the oldest of four. Another brother, Mark D’Andrea, lives in Newport. Lisa, 42, was a teacher who worked for more than 20 years with special-needs children. Bethany Aspinwall teaches the special-education classroom across the hall from Lisa at Cranston High School East.
The two close friends had also worked together at Meeting Street School and Bradley Hospital, both in East Providence. “She was my very, very good friend,” Aspinwall said. “She baby-sat my kids. I sold her this place when I moved around the corner into a bigger house. . . . I’ve worked every place she has worked.”
Lisa wouldn’t have been at The Station that night if school had been in session, Aspinwall said. She went with several friends, including Abbie L. Hoisington, a special-education teacher in Burrillville, who also died in the fire.
“She went to bed by 8:30 p.m. every night,” the friend recalled. “She woke up at 4 a.m. to work out and was at school in the morning by 6:15, 6:30. . . . She only stayed out late maybe three to four times a year.” Aspinwall most remembers her friend as a giver. During the recent snowstorm, Lisa didn’t hesitate to shovel the driveway of her parents, William and Phyllis D’Andrea, who live in Riverside, her hometown.
Lisa also worked with her Bay Spring and West Barrington neighbors to restore the Allin’s Cove salt marsh. “There’s so many slackers around, but that wasn’t Lisa,” Aspinwall said. “She gave back so much of herself. You call Lisa, and she’ll be there.”
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October 10, 1975 — February 20, 2003
Lisa Kelly’s 6-year-old daughter will always know the story of rabbits.
The children’s story, which Lisa wrote about a year ago, says that sometimes rabbits leave behind friends. They join other rabbits in a place called the Great Meadow, not seen but never far away, like a “cool breeze upon your ears.” The breezes are symbols, living memories. Lisa, 27, left many behind. There are the five tiny vases filled with red carnations on the vanity in her Swansea home. Her mother sees them, then sees so much more.
“I can just picture her putting on her makeup, getting ready to go out,” says her mother, Barbara Nagle of Attleboro. “They are still there in those little vases. They are beautiful, like she was. Barbara can look back in time and see Lisa playing soccer and running track at Attleboro High School, in the town where she grew up.
Then she can jump to today. There is the Chinese song that Lisa’s daughter, Zoe Jean, sings. She learned it at the Montessori Children’s School in Providence. Lisa, a single mom, worked hard to afford it. “She did it all by herself. Nobody helped her pay for anything,” Barbara says.
There are Lisa’s teas with Zoe Jean on the East Side of Providence, or the Thai food, or the rock ‘n’ eat atmosphere of Johnny Rockets restaurant. And the many meals at Dave and Buster’s. Barbara can’t forget. She is caring for one of the stuffed animals Lisa won there. She also takes care of Lisa’s many pets, including two cats, Lucky and Black Sabbath — after one of the first heavy-metal bands.
Yes, breezes are blowing. But the breezes, the memories of Lisa’s life, vary widely. Some are tranquil, like yoga lessons Lisa taught at the Montessori Children’s School, at a North Attleboro school and was set to teach at a Warwick karate school. Some are adventurous, like last summer when Lisa took Zoe Jean to the Ozzfest concert. Headlining the heavy-metal show was Ozzy Osbourne, once the bane of moms everywhere until he converted to a reality TV dad. Some are simply shared experience. Barbara is grateful for the time Lisa took her to Disney World in Florida where they saw Cirque du Soleil perform impossible moves. And working together to plant that Japanese garden at Lisa’s house, the one with irises and a little Japanese maple tree.
But there is also something more permanent than memories. Between yoga and heavy metal, Lisa wrote things down in journals. When Barbara, Zoe Jean and some 300 people went to Lisa’s funeral and wake, they heard some of Lisa’s poems. Then, like the rabbits in Lisa’s story, they could hear her, feel her close.
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1963 — February 20, 2003
Lori K. Durante was a petite person — but when she cheered for her sons’ sports teams, her voice could be heard above everybody else’s. Lori, 40, was a medical technician who worked second and third shifts at West Warwick’s West View Nursing Home. She would sometimes go without sleep so she could attend the basketball and baseball games of her sons, 15-year-old Anthony, who attends West Warwick High School, and 13-year-old Matthew, a student at St. Joseph’s School.
Friend Susan Verrier, whose son goes to school with Matthew, said she will miss seeing — and hearing — Lori at basketball games. “She did everything for her boys,” says Lori’s sister, Tonda Daniels, of Wakefield. When she wasn’t caring for her children and the residents of West View, Lori was volunteering her time at St. Joseph’s.
“She was a constant presence at the school,” Susan said. “She loved her boys, her patients at work, her friends — and everybody loved her. She did so much for so many people — nothing was a chore for her.” All who knew her will remember Lori’s sparkling blue eyes, bright smile and distinctive laugh, Susan said.
Lori moved to West Warwick 15 years ago after having also lived in Warwick and North Kingstown. She maintained a close relationship with her parents, Paul and Betty Roe, and her brother, Jeffrey Roe, all of North Kingstown, Tonda said. Lori shared custody of her sons with her ex-husband, Anthony Durante of West Warwick.
Her companion of two years, Tom Medeiros, 40, also died in the nightclub fire. Lori met Tom while caring for his mother, who lives at West View. Friend Deborah Parente, of Warwick, remembered Lori as an all-around good person. “She never had a bad thing to say about anybody,” Deborah said.
Tonda says she will especially miss Lori during the holiday season, when the entire family would always gather. But she said her sister’s spirit will live on in her sons, whose eyes resemble their mother’s. “When we look into their eyes we’ll always know she was there.”
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October 1, 1968 — February 20, 2003
Louis S. Alves had helped steer a co-worker’s children away from what he thought were inappropriate movies so many times that she dubbed him the “Corruption Control.” Alves’s mind was like a sponge, according to his younger sister, Carla Alves. She said he soaked up trivia about baseball, football, and entertainment. Without missing a beat, he knew if a movie scene or song lyric might be ill-suited for teenagers. “He knew something about everything, so people asked him questions all the time,” Carla Alves said. “He could tell you stuff about sports that happened before he was even born. He never flaunted it. He just knew.”
Alves was a diehard fan of the New York Yankees and Miami Dolphins, even though he was born in Providence and lived in New England all his life, his sister said. He cheered for the Yankees even as the rest of his friends and family cheered for the Red Sox, she said. “People just liked him and accepted it as a part of who he was.”
Alves loved all kinds of music, including blues and rock ‘n’ roll, and he loved to sing. Growing up, he played keyboards and accordion, and he was active in the chorus at Lincoln High School, Carla Alves said. All day long, his co-workers at Poly-Flex Circuits of Cranston heard music blaring from his cubicle, where he had designed circuits for medical companies for the last four years, according to Michael Jordan, his friend and supervisor.
Alves, a graduate of the New England Institute of Technology, often lightened the work atmosphere with funny stories. He was the one who rallied colleagues for after-work beers and organized fishing trips or sporting events, Jordan said. “This is a close-knit company, and he drove us closer together,” Jordan said. “He lifted spirits, cracked jokes, and made us leave our desks to go drinking every once in a while.”
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February 12, 1981 — February 20, 2003
Mark Fontaine made others happy just by being around them. His large circle of friends often gathered at his home on Country View Drive, in Johnston, where Mark, 22, went out of his way to make adults — even those a lot older than his friends — feel comfortable.
“He always had a hug for you, even when his friends were around,” said his grandmother Pauline Fortier. “His friends saw it and they’d hug you too.” Even though Mark weighed only 115 pounds, he was the peacemaker when arguments broke out among friends, his mother, Chris, says. “All of his friends respected him because of the kind of person he was.”
About eight of Mark’s relatives and friends went to the concert at The Station together. Two others, Stephen M. Libera of North Kingstown and John M. Longiaru, of Johnston, were unable to escape the fire. Mark’s sister Melanie, who was engaged to John Longiaru, was hospitalized.
Growing up in Johnston, Mark was his mother’s “ray of sunshine” because he was always smiling. His desire to grow his hair long occasionally got him into trouble at school. When he was a student at St. Rocco’s, he tried to hide his long hair, his grandmother recalls. But he was sent home, and the hair was cut, she said.
Mark graduated from La Salle Academy in 1999 and took a year off before enrolling in law-enforcement courses at the Community College of Rhode Island. He hoped to be a police officer. Because he was short and thin, he was working out to build up strength for the police physical exam. As a youngster, Mark had studied karate and earned a second-degree brown belt, but he did not pursue the sport after earning the belt.
Thanks to his grandfather Edmond Fortier, he discovered other sports: fishing and golf during visits to Florida. His grandfather taught him to fish in the waters of Sarasota Bay. They went after snook, sea trout and redfish. “He was my fishing buddy,” his grandfather says.
Mark was known for his generosity. “He’d give you his shoes and walk barefoot,” his grandfather says. Mark worked for three years at the Bickford Family Restaurant in North Providence, starting as a cook and working his way up to assistant manager on the night shift.
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January 26, 1971 — February 20, 2003
Whenever Mary H. Baker walked into the room, she immediately made it hers; she was the life of the party, and she liked it that way. Wickedly smart, always sure of herself, and almost always right, Mary delighted in knowing what she was talking about, whether the subject was forensics, serial killers, football, or even auto mechanics, said her sister, Rhonda Roque.
“She was very strong, very headstrong. You could ask her a question, she’d know the answer. And she’d always have the knowledge to back it up,” Roque said. Mary, 32, was born and raised in Fall River and lived there all her life. She was a 1989 graduate of Diman Regional Vocational Technical High School, where she studied auto mechanics, and later attended the Sawyer School in Pawtucket, where she earned her certification as a medical assistant.
For the last six years, Mary worked at Rhode Island Ear, Nose, and Throat in Lincoln, where the doctors considered her far more than just an assistant. “The doctors said they really couldn’t replace her,” said her husband, Warren L. Baker III, a motorcycle technician. The two would regularly spar over who knew better about fixing cars.
“She was very smart. She kind of knew a little bit about everything,” Warren said. Mary was a regular bowler, and she and Warren competed in the Animal House league in Somerset each week. She averaged a 135 — not bad, said Warren, but not as good as his average. “She would beat me. Sometimes,” he said.
The couple dated for six years before they were married in August 2001. They had just bought a house, Warren said. Mary loved watching cop shows and documentaries about serial killers, as well as any kind of documentary on forensic science. She’d always wanted to get into the field herself, Warren said, but never got around to the schooling.
But her real focus in life was her children, Michael DeCosta, 12, Scott DeCosta, 11, John DeCosta, 10, and Allison DeCosta, 9, all from a previous marriage. She had big dreams for all of them — some would become concert musicians, others football players. Mary loved watching her children play football.
Nothing could get her more excited than watching all four kids play and cheerlead for the local Pop Warner team, the Fall River Falcons. “During football season, she was running up the sidelines with them, screaming,” said her sister Rhonda.
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December 14, 1966 — February 20, 2003
Matthew P. Darby liked fast cars, an occasional prank, and anything to do with water. “He was a little boy at heart,” his wife, Melinda, says. “He loved toys, any kind of toys.” Once, while taking his friend’s Corvette for a test drive on New York City streets, he stopped traffic, spinning the wheels of the car in the middle of an intersection. (He had hoped to buy the fastest boat he could afford this summer.)
“He just took life full on, and then he would sit there and just laugh,” Melinda says. Matthew, 36, met his wife at a beach in Florida 17 years ago; she was a waitress and he was a painter. When her parents moved back to Coventry, she stayed with Matthew in Florida. They were fast in love.
They lived there until their first child, Jessica, was born in 1993. At that time, they moved to Coventry to be closer to her parents while raising Jessica. Matthew and Jessica were extremely close. They played video games, built an elaborate model train set- up, and, occasionally, he even let his “Marshmallow” drive the car.
He was the owner and operator of Cousins Painting in Coventry. “He liked his independence,” his father-in-law, Ed Keenan, said. “He tried to work for other people but didn’t like it.” “He knew what he wanted and he went for it,” Melinda said. “He couldn’t be told what to do. He was a leader, not a follower.”
He liked to surf, swim, and sit in the sun — it cleared his mind. “Florida was his favorite place to be, because of the ocean — until he found Newport,” Melinda said. “He just liked everything about the water.” He enjoyed surfing so much that while painting on a job in Newport, he once slipped away, bought a board and hit the waves.
“I’ve seen him go surfing one time in Newport and come out of the water so beat up,” his father-in-law said. “He had no fear.” But the most important thing for Matthew was providing for his family. “That’s what gave him pleasure, making sure we didn’t need anything,” Melinda said.
He dreamed of buying a large, waterfront home for Melinda and Jessica. Later this month, Melinda expects Jessica’s little sister to be born; her name will be Sara Michelle Darby.
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1969 — February 20, 2003
It took three years for Matt Pickett to ask Wendy Weinberg on a date and another three to propose marriage, but he was worth the wait, she says. “He was my soul mate. He was the most fantastic person I have ever known in my entire life.” The two met seven years ago at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and had been dating for three years when they found a split-level house in Bellingham, Mass. Wendy said she didn’t want to close the deal on the house until they were at least engaged. He proposed last June 30, her 30th birthday, on the Echo Bridge over the Charles River in Newton, where they grew up. They closed on the Bellingham house the next day.
Wendy said her fiancé collected everything — newspapers, tapes, CDs, records which he shared with his hundreds, if not thousands, of friends all over the world. “He had not one enemy, ever,” she says. He went to The Station with his friend Joe Cristina, who survived the fire but suffered second-degree burns, Wendy said. Matt loved music; it “made his heart soar,” she says. Matt was a giver, she said, who would drop everything to help a friend. “He gave so much of himself, even if he had nothing.”
Wendy said her fiancé had just celebrated his seventh year of sobriety. “He and I were each other’s support systems. He gave me hope, he gave me strength, he told me about life.” Most of all, she said, “He was my best friend. My very best friend.” She already had her dress for their wedding. It was to be held Oct. 19.
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1957 — February 20, 2003
Melvin A. Gerfin Jr., 46, of Groton, Conn., was a father of three who liked heavy-metal music, computers and NASCAR races.
He had been laid off from Wyman-Gordon in Groton, a metal components factory, and was working at home and cleaning the offices at New London radio station XL102. When the station gave out free tickets to the Great White show, Mr. Gerfin was among the recipients.
He loved race cars and the Washington Redskins. He also loved to laugh. He used his knowledge of computers to help friends and family members. Mr. Gerfin was the husband of Deborah DeCosta and the father of three daughters, Meagan, Kelly and Laura. “He was a great father and husband and was loved very much by his family and friends,” said his sister, Terry Robertson.
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May 20, 1970 — February 20, 2003
Michael A. Fresolo was a carpenter and roofer by trade and tradition, and because of his abundant energy and strong work ethic, buildings he helped raise dot the Millbury, Mass., area where he grew up. The tools on the 32-year-old’s carpenter’s belt also helped build a good life for his wife, Yvette, and his two little daughters, Emily, 4, and Maria, who turns 2 this month.
“When we were in the car, he was always pointing out different places, saying, ‘Hey, babe, I did that roof, and that one over there, too,’ ” recalls his wife of five years. “He was always very, very proud of his work.” By all accounts, Michael was a generous, hard-working family man. Arthur Sisko, a colleague in the Local 107 carpenters’ union out of Worcester, which Michael had belonged to for five years, said he was always ready to lend a hand to help out a buddy.
“On the day before the Rhode Island fire, he was up on a friend’s roof helping to clean all the snow off,” said Sisko. “That’s the kind of a person he was, just a real good guy.” Michael had a bright personality that made him great fun to be around, except for one inclination that drove some family and friends nuts: he, a Massachusetts native, was a die hard New York Yankees fan, like his father, Albert, and he loved ribbing Red Sox fans whenever he got the chance.
“Living in New England, it was sometimes a little difficult, you know. But Michael, he really got a big kick out of rooting for the Yankees,” says his wife, smiling at the memory. “He had hats, shirts, everything. He’d even have the kids going, ‘Yankees, yay! Red Sox, boo!’ He loved the New York Giants, too.”
Always into sports, Michael took up golf about five years ago and threw himself into it with his characteristic gusto, playing Sundays with his brother, Joseph, and several friends at a nearby country club. A toy golf cart, which he pushed his baby daughters around in, sits in the snow-patched backyard of his home.
“He took his golf seriously, but he always had the ability to keep things light, fun and filled with lots of laughs,” says golf partner Robert J. McFadden of Shrewsbury. “Golf can be a frustrating game, but everybody knew they’d have a good time when they played with him.”Surrounded by photographs of her grinning husband in the family’s dining room, Yvette says simply, he was “one of those people who brightens up a room.”
“On the outside, Michael could seem like he was one of those rough-tough sort of guys, but he wasn’t that at all,” Yvette says. “He was a real softie, and there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his kids. I think he’s our guardian angel now.”
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October 9, 1971 — February 20, 2003
Mike Cordier could often be found along the shores of Quonochontaug Pond. It was there that he fished, clammed, and thought. “He spent more time there than any place else,” said his father, Ron. Mike would cast a line anytime, day or night, hoping for bluefish, bass or whatever the waters held. “Whenever the fish were running, he was there,” confirmed Nicole Dorcas, Mike’s girlfriend of four years.
Those were fun times shared with family and friends. “Even if we didn’t catch anything we had a good time; we’d hang out,” said John Herlihy, of Westerly. Mike and John became fast friends in seventh grade after meeting during a Westerly football game that pitted neighborhood against neighborhood. A love of sports — baseball, hockey and football — and the outdoors fused their friendship. The best times were spent just hanging out, sharing a beer, talking.
“He’s like the brother I never had; he’s my best friend,” Herlihy said. Mike was known as a prankster with a warm smile and quick wit. His hijinks, his family and friends say, are not fit for print. But it was his generous spirit that set him apart, they say.
“There was never a time that he said no,” said Paul Woerner, a friend since the two attended junior high school in Westerly years ago. He tended to put others first, often tipping double and insisting on treating his companions to drinks and dinner. “It was one of those things that used to irk me,” his father said. “I used to tell him to put himself first. He would give people more than he’d give to himself.”
After a recent snowstorm, Mike appeared at his parents’ house. He hadn’t been around for a few weeks, but knowing that his father had a bad back, he came to shovel the driveway. Amid the snow and cold, father and son reminisced and planned for the fishing season ahead. “He was my best fishing partner,” Ron Cordier said.
Mike, 32, who moved to North Kingstown last summer, was dedicated to his job as a merchandiser. He was working a promotion for his employer, McLaughlin & Moran, when the fire at The Station broke out. His family said he filled a shift at the last minute for a coworker, handing out T-shirts and hats near the front door.
×
February 13, 1972 — February 20, 2003
They met at Wal-Mart in Seekonk nine years ago. Mike Hoogasian was a gregarious young man with a big smile and easygoing way that earned him the nickname “The Mayor” from his family. He was a merchandiser for Coca-Cola and was at Wal-Mart to stock the shelves with soda. As always, he said hello to everyone, but the shy and beautiful girl working behind the optometry counter caught his eye. He was 23. She was 19.
“The day he met her, he was like a little schoolboy,” said Mike’s best friend, Derek N. Knight, of Exeter. “He knew he had found the perfect woman. He sounded like he won the lottery.” Sandy Leocadio didn’t say much to Mike, but she left a note on his Coca-Cola car saying she thought he was nice.
“She was quiet and young and drop-dead gorgeous,” said Paula A. McLaughlin, Mike’s sister, who would later be Sandy’s maid of honor. “She came from a strict Portuguese family.” But Sandy also had a tattoo on her arm, a love of heavy-metal music, and a gift for fashion that fueled her professional aspirations.
Sandy had always been trendy. As a girl, she’d slip out of her home in conservative clothes and change into her own stylish creations once she was out of view. Sandy became a visual merchandiser for Cherry & Webb, and eventually The Gap. When The Gap’s fashion sense didn’t suit her, Sandy altered it, like the time she slit the legs of her Gap jeans, filled the opening with red material and wore them to a Gap corporate meeting.
McLaughlin said Sandy was “head over heels” for Mike. Their interests were identical. Like her, Mike loved tattoos and ’80s metal music. He freely admitted his musical preferences were stuck in a time warp.
Their wedding in 2001 was unforgettable, just the way Sandy wanted it. Sandy unleashed all of her fashion and creative skills on her wedding. She designed her own dress, a tea-stained gown with a long train. She carried an old bible and a rosary instead of flowers. She designed the jewelry worn by Mike and the wedding party. She also designed her bridesmaids’ dresses, which were made of an iridescent bronze raincoat material and topped with jean coats.
The reception took place at the Great Hall, the former Central Congregational Church in Fall River, where Lizzie Borden once attended church and where Aerosmith taped a video — facts that delighted both Sandy and Mike. “She wanted her wedding to become famous,” McLaughlin said. Sandy, who still carried photos of her nuptials, hoped to be a wedding planner someday.
Nine years after they met, they often held hands and Sandy still sat on Mike’s lap. The couple were inseparable. The evening of Feb. 20 was shaping up to be a wonderful night, combining everything the couple loved: tattoos, rock ‘n’ roll, and each other. At 6 p.m., they dipped into their “tattoo fund” and went to a Warwick shop to get flames etched into Mike’s upper arm. It was his birthday gift. He had about nine tattoos, including a profile of Sandy.
At the tattoo parlor, Doors of Perception, they met Jack Russell, the lead singer of Great White who was also getting a tattoo. Mike was flabbergasted to meet one of his teen idols. He called his sister and two close friends from his cell phone. “He sounded like he was 12 years old,” Knight said.
Mike knew all of Great White’s songs, even the obscure ones. Russell was impressed, and he put Mike and Sandy’s names on the VIP list to his show that night.
McLaughlin said she’s grateful they died together. “We picture them together, like a bright light,” she said. “Together forever. A perfect love.”
×
May 1, 1972 — February 20, 2003
Michael Joseph Kulz, 30, worked hard. He stocked shelves six days a week in the dairy department of Stop & Shop, where he had worked since he was 15. His aunt sometimes visited him at work. “He wouldn’t stop,” said Bettie A. Smith, of Johnston. “He’d stand there and talk to you, but he kept working. He took his work seriously.”
Mike lived on Poplar Street in Warwick with his parents, George A. and Barbara A. Kulz. His mother says her son was easygoing and never gave them any trouble. Each morning when she awoke, she’d unlock the front door so he wouldn’t have to take out his key when he arrived home from his late-night shift.
Mike was a basic guy, friends and relatives say. He liked playing video games, corresponding in Internet chat rooms, playing pool and watching science-fiction shows such as the X-Files, Smallville and Twilight Zone.
“I don’t think I ever heard him utter the words ‘I want,’ ” says his friend Joseph J. LoBianco, of North Providence. “Mike never said things like ‘I really want a new Corvette.’ I never heard him say ‘I’d like to get a really big stereo system.’ He never wished for a fancy outfit he saw at the mall, and he never dreamed of owning a mansion in Palm Beach,” LoBianco said. “Mike simply had a few basic needs: a TV with a remote control, a computer with good Internet access, and a reliable car, but nothing really extravagant.”
Mike’s one indulgence was an occasional pilgrimage to Disney World. He loved the resort and collected Scrooge McDuck figurines. Nobody knows why he liked Scrooge McDuck so much, but he seemed to like the challenge of finding the lesser-known character.
LoBianco met Mike 15 years ago when they both worked in the video store inside Stop & Shop in Johnston, where Mike worked until five years ago, when he transferred to the Mansfield, Mass., store. They shared a love of melodic hard rock, particularly Great White. So when LoBianco heard Great White was playing in West Warwick, he got a pair of tickets and invited his old friend. Mike swapped shifts to get the night off.
LoBianco was injured in the fire but escaped. Someone found him crawling on the floor and threw him out a broken window. Mike never made it out.
Mrs. Kulz said she is learning more about her son from his coworkers. “He was so quiet, but they tell me at work that he used to make them laugh,” she said. “I didn’t know that about him.”
×
1963 — February 20, 2003
He was the man whose voice kept Rhode Island rock ‘n’ rollers company through night’s darkest hours. The Doctor — also known as Mike Gonsalves, 40, of Warwick — has been described by colleagues in the radio business as “a real Rhode Island character,” a “true original,” and simply as “a franchise” radio celebrity.
There are few people who could draw 4,000 people to the Dunkin’ Donuts Center for a service; Mike did that. On March 1, fans and friends came to the arena for a memorial vigil. “I liked his attitude,” said one fan, Steven Coletta, 34, of Cranston. “He’s funny. Anyone can call him.”
For 17 years Mike hosted The Metal Zone, a Saturday night radio show dedicated to heavy-metal music. It was the longest-running heavy metal show in the country. The Doctor also took to the airwaves every Monday through Friday from midnight to 5:30 a.m., playing rock and heavy metal for nightshift workers and insomniacs. On Friday mornings, he hosted the Legs & Eggs breakfast at the Foxy Lady strip club.
Mike broke into the radio scene with WHJY in 1986, the year he graduated from Rhode Island College. He hosted a program called “The Dr. Metal Show” for WRIC, the college’s low-wattage radio station. At WHJY, Mike first used the sobriquet “The Metal Doctor,” which over time was truncated to The Doctor; around the station, friends just knew him as Doc.
Mike grew up in Providence in a white bungalow on the corner of River Avenue and Pleasant Valley Parkway, not far from Rhode Island College. His father, Neil, still works at the college as a biology professor.
Mike graduated from the former Our Lady of Providence High School, where he lettered in baseball and won All-State honors in tennis. He captained the Rhode Island College tennis team, and continued to play tennis throughout his life. “Mike was very gracious in victory and defeat, and was very generous with line calls,” said Paul Fuller, his tennis partner.
The Doctor’s knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll and metal music was matched by his knowledge of baseball: last year, he assembled the best team in a baseball rotisserie league, winning the Federal League title with his entry called Legs and Eggs. He also played softball and tennis at a high level. Although less than 5-feet-7 inches, he played basketball in a men’s league; one player described him as “a waterbug” for the way he skimmed across a basketball court.
But his passion was music, particularly heavy-metal music. On WHJY’s Web site, The Doctor listed among his favorite bands Metallica, Black Sabbath and Ozzy. Under “Rock Stars I’ve Partied With” he listed Chris Robinson, Slash, and Vince Neil. And under “Coolest Show I’ve Ever Seen,” ranked in third place was a 1985 performance in Providence of Judas Priest and Great White.
On the night of the fire, Mike introduced Great White. That was the last time anybody heard the voice that comforted so many for so long through the darkness of night.
×
1964 — February 20, 2003
When he was 17, Mitch Shubert broke his back during a motorcycle training run. The doctors inserted two metal rods, wrapped him in a body cast for six months and crossed their fingers. No more riding, they said. “I have to get back on because I can’t let fear override this. I will ride again,” he told his mother. “And he did,” Ann Shubert said. Ten weeks after the accident, while still in his body cast, he was doing wheelies out in the family’s pasture. Starting right from birth, when he almost died, it seemed Mitch was always being tested. Tested by the cycling accident that ended his dreams of going pro. Tested by divorce and separation from his children. Tested by customers who took advantage of his good nature.
Mitch, 39, never quit or complained. And through it all, he never lost his broad smile or what his brother Matt called “his superhuman kindness.” “He’d give you the shirt off his back, even if he didn’t have another one to put on,” his mother said. “You needed it, you got it. He was just that type of person.” He tried living in Rhode Island for awhile, but the Southern boy never could take to the cold weather. Shorts and T-shirts were more his style. Mitch returned to his native Florida two years ago and built a dirt track on his 5-acre property in Newberry, for his son and stepson to ride. Being back with family meant everything, and it thrilled him to no end to see his son Mitchie following in his dad’s tire tracks. Before long, Mitch became a Pied Piper of motocross, getting other children excited about the sport and forming lasting friendships with their parents. “Even if you’d only met him a few months ago, it felt like you knew him your whole life,” said Ronnie Irwin, who met Mitch through The Rock Church, in Gainesville.
A general contractor by trade, Mitch was the type of guy who couldn’t sit still — always working, always on the go. He especially loved the outdoors: hunting, fishing, playing with his kids. Over the years, he’d become a big NASCAR fan and went to Daytona International Speedway every chance he got. Jeff Gordon was his favorite driver. He even liked to cook outdoors. “Man, he could make ribs that would just melt in your mouth,” Ann said. His brother Mark recently came across a photo that Matt had taken. Mitch and Mark shared the same birthday. Every May 1 the family had a barbecue bash. Mitch would show up at 7 a.m. and stay at the grill all day. “It was a beautiful picture, too,” Mark said. “We’re standing there. He’s got a chicken in one hand. And in the other hand, he’s got a jar of ‘bone-sucking sauce.’ It was, like, the classic Mitchell picture, you know?”
Mitch traveled back to Rhode Island for personal reasons and to help a friend, Kevin Blom, with a construction project. Feeling nostalgic, they decided to hear some rock ‘n’ roll at The Station. Mitch was a born-again Christian. It was the first time he’d gone to a night club in eight years.
×
January 28, 1985 — February 20, 2003
Tall, slim, blond, and 18 years old, Nicholas Philip O’Neill dreamed of being a rock star in a “hair metal” band, his friends say. Party anthems from the ’80s were in his blood. He wrote more than 50 of his own songs, catchy tunes about girlfriends and hanging out, and performed them as the lead singer of his band, Shryne. His father, radio personality and “Father Misgivings” creator Dave Kane, said his son was a natural musician from when he was a small child. By the age of 18, he had recorded a CD. “We got him five guitar lessons and he just took off,” Kane said. “What really hurts about it,” said friend Dave Tessier, 32, “is this kid was just an amazing songwriter. When I met him, the kid was 16 and he’d written all these great tunes. I was in awe of him.”
Nick was expecting to hear some more good music when he went to The Station on Feb. 20 with bandmate Jon Brennan. Jon made it out alive. “He was actually with Nick until the final moments when it went black, and they got separated,” said Jon’s mother, Kari Tieger. Nick was born in Warwick, a son of Joanne O’Neill of Pawtucket, formerly of Cranston, and Kane, of North Providence. He lived most of his life in Cranston, attending Cranston High School East before moving to Pawtucket several month ago.
In addition to being a talented rocker, Nick is remembered as a gifted performer for All Children’s Theatre, according to Wrenn Goodrum, the East Providence group’s artistic director. “He was always so full of life,” Goodrum said. His jokes would break the tension during a tough rehearsal. His smiles would encourage even the younger members of the troupe, who admired him. “He had a special way of working with them so they could find their parts, their character,” she said. “Even some of the kids we adults couldn’t reach.” “Nick and I, we used to goof around,” said a friend from the theater troupe, Dan Kenner, 16. Kenner remembers that once, while they rehearsed for a play about the Holocaust, O’Neill’s role called for him to come onstage and greet the other people in the room with a kiss on the cheek. It was supposed to be a somber moment. But as he entered, he whispered jokes in the actors’ ears, sending them into stitches. “All the other kids would get in trouble,” Dan said, laughing. “You could always count on Nick for a joke.”
×
June 1, 1969 — February 20, 2003
Pam grew up in Johnston, graduating from Johnston High School in 1987, and later the Sawyer School, where she studied hospitality.
She often spoke of how much she loved her job at the Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, doing food and beverage purchasing, as well as daily breakfast setup for between 100 and 150 guests. She was promoted to that job after serving as front desk supervisor. She twice won the hotel’s coveted “Quality Champion of the Month” award.
Jim Petrone, the hotel’s general manager, said that Pam had the perfect disposition for hotel work, and a promising future. “We truly lost a remarkable person,” Petrone said, adding that many at the hotel were in tears at the news of her death.
Three and a half years ago, Pam moved back in with her parents, into the same Johnston home where she grew up. She brought JD, her rotweiller-German shepherd mix with her, referred to by her parents as their “grand-dog.” She said she hoped to save enough to buy a house of her own.
Pam had two nephews and a niece, whom she doted on. She took Samantha and Austin Gruttadauria, her niece and older nephew, to karate every Wednesday night, and often spent parts of weekends with them. Others said that at gatherings, Pam was the adult who would most likely be on the floor playing with the kids.
As a child, her parents said, Pam was strong-willed, full of energy, and a good athlete who played youth softball through age 15. Her mom and dad attended every one of her games. Anna Gruttadauria said her daughter wasn’t the nightclub type, and would often go to bed early since she had to be at the hotel by 5:30 a.m. for breakfast setup.
She preferred a much different kind of music than that offered by Great White, the metal band that played at The Station the night of the fire. One of Pam’s favorite singers was Barbra Streisand. Her mother said she went to the concert only because her friend Donna Mitchell, a reservationist at the Holiday Inn, said she was going with a few others, and asked Pam to come along.
Pam was standing near the band with Donna Mitchell, and some of Donna’s friends, when the fire began. The group began to move toward the nearby back exit, but Pam’s mom said a bouncer reportedly told them it was reserved for the band. Donna Mitchell, 29, died in the fire.
“She was a very happy-go-lucky girl, a real homebody,” her mother said yesterday. “Very full of energy. Just a good person. Her whole focus was her family, and she just loved her niece and nephew. That’s what she lived for, to be with her family.”
×
19972 — February 20, 2003
Rachael Florio-DePietro arrived at family parties smiling and offering “hellos” all around. She took care to say “love you” to everyone before she left. For family members who still talk about her in the present tense, it was Rachael’s caring, kindhearted spirit that drew people in from the moment they met her.
“You couldn’t meet her and not like her,” said her father, George Florio. “She loved being around people. She always took an interest.” Rachael, 31, of Coventry, loved nature, too, and she dreamed of planting a big garden. She enjoyed walking in the woods with her friends and family. Most of all, she loved little animals.
In one of the oldest family photos, a very young Rachael totters through a petting-zoo pen with docile goats and geese. Rabbits almost as big as Rachael lounge nearby. The image is old and blurry, but the picture is clear: Rachael is wandering around to each creature, saying “hello.”
Her Aunt Betty remembers one time Rachael saw a wounded animal hobbling across the road as she drove home. It was an opossum, maybe, or a raccoon. Whatever it was, Rachael worried it would get smashed by another car. She pulled over and stepped into the street, guarding the animal until it lurched off into the bushes.
That caring instinct matured, her father said, when Rachael gave birth to her son Adrian, now 7. Adrian lives with Rachael’s ex-husband, Dean DePietro. “She was a devoted mom,” Florio said. “She’d do anything for Adrian.”
Rachael shared her love of animals — and of people — with her brother, Adam Florio, 26. The two had always been close, hanging out, teasing each other, quoting lines from favorite movies and television shows like Seinfeld, and then acting out goofy scenes together.
Adam was with her at The Station that night. When fire tore through the club, he lost sight of his sister in the smoke and press of panicked people. He managed to escape through a window; relatives saw him on TV, cooling burns on his head with handfuls of snow. Rachael never made it out.
Adam was hospitalized for a week with serious burns and seared lungs. His family postponed Rachael’s funeral at his request, until he was well enough to be there.
×
1979 — February 20, 2003
Rebecca Shaw just had a way about her. With her long blond hair, blue eyes, stylish clothes, high heels, and perfect makeup, “she was almost a throwback with the way she carried herself, the way she walked. Her posture was impeccable,” said Kerri A. Baccari, the office administrator at RE/MAX real estate office in Cranston, where Becky worked part-time.
Becky, 24, was a business management major at Providence College. Her father, John Shaw, is a professor in the college’s marketing department. “She had such a rich background she could relate to anybody,” said her mother, Ann Shaw. Becky grew up in Sudbury, Mass., where she learned to play the piano, speak French, crochet and ride horses. But this ladylike young woman also had a penchant for 1980s rock bands.
She’d hear about a concert on the radio and say “let’s go” — like the time she persuaded her reluctant friend Megan C. Connelly, with whom she shared a house in Warwick, to accompany her to a concert by a KISS tribute band. “Plans didn’t need to be made. She lived life on the wire,” Connelly said. Becky frequently ordered and paid for takeout dinners for her roommate. Sometimes, however, she tried to pass off chocolate as a main meal.
When the two roommates were bored, Becky would lead them in an adult version of “dress-up.” They would go through their closets and try on all their old clothing, particularly old prom gowns. “She spoiled the people she loved,” Connelly said. The women both worked at RE/MAX and became roommates about a year ago. Becky often went to a lounge to listen to Connelly sing karaoke. Becky’s close friend, Jeffrey Rader, of Danville, Calif., also died in the fire. They met at a concert about six months ago and had been dating seriously for the last three months.
“I don’t think I’d seen her happier,” said Connelly.
×March 17, 1965 — February 20, 2003
They miss Richard A. Cabral Jr. at work. They miss his tattoos, the ones featuring characters from author J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They miss the jokester who sometimes wore a crown at work, fashioned from the twist-ties used to close bread bags.
For the last six years, Richard, 37, of Attleboro, has been one of the “mill boys,” the guys who worked together in the raw materials department of Leach & Garner in North Attleboro, making parts used to design 14-karat gold settings for jewelry.
Coworker Terri Fraatz called them the “mill boys” because they shared silly rituals such as “the banging of the pipes.” That’s when they would pretend that the building’s pipes were musical instruments and bang out a beat.
“I only knew Richard for 2 1/2 years. He was a quiet guy when we first met; however, over the years, we ended up debating everything under the sun,” said coworker David Provencher in one of the many tributes employees have written. “It shows a lot about Dick that a fun family outing was going to Great Woods for an all-day Oz festival.”
That’s Oz as in Ozzy Osbourne, the heavy-metal singer and, more recently, MTV reality-show dad. Unlike some dads, Richard gladly listened to the music. “He liked it all,” his wife, Catherine, said of hard-rock music. Catherine says Tolkien’s world of hobbits and wizards battling great evil had captured her husband’s interest for years. He enjoyed the recent movie adaptations and had tattoos on his back of all the major characters from the trilogy.
Mostly, though, his wife remembers a family man who doted on their children, Richard A. Cabral III and Christine R. Cabral. “Very caring,” she says, noting that the family never lacked for anything. Richard and Catherine would have celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary in June.
×
1974 — February 20, 2003
To family and friends, he was Big Bob, the gentle giant. After all, Robert D. Young, 29, of Taunton, stood 6 feet, 6 inches and had a perpetual smile. For fun, he loved sports, and he loved music, especially heavy-metal “hair bands” like Poison, Guns N’ Roses and Great White. So it was no surprise when Bob and three friends attended Great White’s show at The Station. The gang had gone to see Guns N’ Roses last year at The Fleet Center. It was one of the best times they’d had together, says Nate Chadwick, a close friend and business partner.
They’d also driven down to New Orleans last year, to see the Patriots beat the St. Louis Rams, 20 to 17, in the Super Bowl. A typical die-hard New England sports fan, Bob couldn’t watch during the fateful field goal kick that sealed the Patriots’ victory. “He was bawling ‘I can’t look,’ ” Chadwick says. ” ‘I know he missed it. But that was not the typical Bob, who was known more for his calmness and optimism, even when others were about to crack.
A 1991 graduate of Foxboro High School, Bob studied information systems at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. He met Chadwick in 1995, and the two hit it off, becoming best friends. Two years ago, they formed a computer consulting business, Chadwick and Young, with Bob designing operating systems and programs for the company’s business customers. Bob and Jennifer were married on Valentine’s Day last year. They celebrated their first anniversary the weekend before the fire. Bob bought Jennifer a dozen red roses and they went to Cape Cod.
That kind of behavior was typical, says Josephine Young, Bob’s paternal grandmother, who lives in Foxboro. He had a big laugh and a loving heart, she says. “I loved him dearly. He was my darling. I’m sure that if he was in that fire he was probably trying to help people.”
The friends who attended the show with Bob escaped through a side exit, said Chadwick, whose brother, Joe Lusardi, was among the four who attended. Chadwick said his brother told him that as the fire spread, Bob reacted with his typical calmness. “One of the last things Bob said is ‘just calm down. Remember Chicago, because that’s how people get killed.’ ” When Lusardi, John Kudryck and Gary Stein — who was recently discharged from Brigham & Women’s Hospital — escaped, they turned and looked for Bob. “They thought he was right behind them.”
×
July 13, 1971 — February 20, 2003
There was no bigger Great White fan than Robert J. Croteau. If you needed proof, you could check out his album collection, every one signed by the band. Or look through his collection of autographed memorabilia, including guitar picks, shirts, and dozens of concert tickets.
He was on a first-name basis with the band members — and even the lead singer’s mother. “He died doing something he really loved,” his mother, Judith, says. Robert, 31, had been assaulted and spent 4 1/2 months in a coma last year. To try to bring him out of it, his family played Great White’s songs in his hospital room. One album in particular was being played a lot on the radio at the time. It was called Recovery. When he woke up, all Robert wanted was to hear that album.
“I tried to get him to listen to other bands, but he didn’t want to hear it,” says his brother Tommy. Robert, who grew up in Fall River and graduated from Durfee High, lived with his parents and Tommy. For them, he was an amazing fix-it man and housekeeper in one, happy to clean and arrange the house if anything was out of order.
“The way he collected stuff, and cleaned and fixed everything. Things I couldn’t be bothered with, he’d do,” Tommy says. And he was always excited, whether he was watching wrestling or reruns of All in the Family. “He acted younger than he was. He was 31, but he acted like he was 21,” Tommy said.
Robert worked as a landscaper for Barnes Tree Service in Rochester, Mass., and for Summit Grove Landscaping in Dartmouth, Mass. In his free time, he visited residents at the Cardinal Medeiros elder- care home in Fall River to watch television and play bingo. “He was just a friendly guy,” his mother says. “He liked everybody, and everybody liked him.”
×
1974 — February 20, 2003
Robert Reisner was the proverbial homebody. There was nothing the single, 29-year-old school bus driver liked more than coming home from work to the apartment in Coventry he shared with his mother. He cooked tacos for dinner, played video games and watched the New England Patriots and Boston Bruins on TV. He even liked to read the newspaper aloud to his dog, Aggie.
Well, there was one thing he liked as much. Going to heavy-metal concerts, especially those big-hair bands of the ’80s, the ones that keep reuniting and rocking year after year. His fondness for these bands of his youth often took him to The Station. “He would go by himself. As soon as he heard about a show, he would go buy a ticket,” his younger brother, Ralph, recalled. Not that Robert wouldn’t try to recruit family members to go with him to the concerts. He asked several of them to see Great White on Feb. 20. None could go.
A couple of years ago, he treated his brothers and their spouses to tickets for a farewell KISS concert in Providence. That was Robert, always doing nice things for others, his family says. He would go one, two, sometimes three times a day to buy iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and he would always bring some back for everyone else. Like the day after a snowstorm early last month, when he came by with drinks for family members while they were shoveling out driveways. “He was very caring. He cared for everybody,” said his mother, Judy O’Brien. She is divorced from Robert’s father, Robert Reisner, of New York.
The family has endured some difficult times, O’Brien says. As a single mother, she had to raise her three boys without much money. Then there was Robert’s health. He suffered from extreme bouts of fatigue and fever. By the time he was 11, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Sometimes he had to use a wheelchair. “I used to have to carry him,” O’Brien says.
Robert grew up in Scituate, but stopped going to school in the 11th grade. He delivered pizza for several different West Bay businesses, including Domino’s, and had been promoted to some managerial positions. His mother says he always liked driving because it was easier on his bad leg than jobs that required standing.
A couple of months ago, he began driving school buses for Laidlaw in East Providence. “The kids loved him. He worked so hard for it,” O’Brien says. “It’s what he really liked.” That and the rock bands pictured in the posters adorning the walls of their apartment. They hang near the pull-out sofa where he slept.
×
June 8, 1971 — February 20, 2003
Jodi Zides met Ryan Morin at a bar on Nantucket nine months ago. Right away she liked him. He was funny — he told her he was from L.A., then amended: “Lower Allston,” in Massachusetts. The two sparred back and forth, using the old tools of flirtation: sarcasm and wit.
But she also felt at ease around him. A month later, they took a trip to Canada — a 12-hour car ride that gave them a lot of time to get to know each other. They hiked the coast and kayaked along the shore through heavy mist. It was something Ryan, an adventurer, had done before, but a whole new world for Jodi. “That was not my background,” she said. “He was able to bring me up there and show me something new.”
Ryan Morin, 31, was known as an explorer. He was a world traveler, looking forward to a trip to New Zealand at the end of the month. He drove a red Jeep Wrangler and loved hiking, kayaking and bungee-jumping. He surfed before work and snowboarded on the weekends.
Listening to a litany of Ryan’s accomplishments at a memorial service, his boss, Maria Cirino, was amazed. “It sounded like you were listening to fifty years of activity,” said Cirino, CEO of Guardent, the computer-security company where Ryan was an engineer. “When did this guy have time to do all this?”
But Ryan found time to stay close to his parents, Paul A. Morin and Susan Morin, both of Thompson, Conn., said Kevin Brown, a close friend. He’d visit his mother at least once a week, Brown said. An amateur guitarist, Ryan also loved music — especially Van Halen and other classic rock bands. When a group of friends from work scored free tickets to the Great White show, he was excited.
Jodi talked to him as he was leaving work that Thursday. “I told him to have a good time,” she said. “I told him to be careful and drive safely.” It was only after Ryan’s death that Jodi heard from his friends and family that he’d been thinking about marriage. Jodi was the one, he’d told them.
He was even trying to decide whether their children would be raised Catholic, like him, or Jewish, like Jodi, Kevin Brown said. Whether he would have spoken — and what she would have said — they’ll never know. That was all in the future. They were just starting out.
×
1966 — February 20, 2003
Samuel J. Miceli Jr. was quiet, until you got to know him. Then, he’d start making jokes, tossing in humorous comments throughout the day, getting coworkers to laugh outright as they installed windows, working hard all day. “He could make anyone laugh at any time,” says Dan Laferriere, who worked with Sam for a year and a half for the home-improvement section of Tri-State Window Distributors Inc., in Montville, Conn. Sam, 37, worked as a contractor for the window company. All day long, we’d be talking. He was really funny and outgoing.”
Sam won tickets to the Great White show from a New London radio station, and brought his girlfriend, Jude Henault. They both died in the fire. The two lived together in Lisbon, Conn., and Sam was devoted to Jude’s three children, Angela, 19, Rachel, 12, and Andrew, 10.
The two youngest lived with Sam and Jude near a pond, and the whole family enjoyed the wildlife there. Dan said Sam particularly liked feeding the swans and would spend hours just “hanging out” by the water, soaking up nature, paddling a canoe. Along with listening to live music, Sam loved fast cars and “all types of automotive racing,” Dan said.
Dan, who is 20, said he looked up to Sam, and often asked him for advice. The two had grown close in less than two years. “He was the type of person who was friends with everyone, wherever we went,” Dan said. “I’m just going to miss his presence, talking to him every day, working with him.”
× June 3, 1976 — February 20, 2003
They met at Wal-Mart in Seekonk nine years ago. Mike Hoogasian was a gregarious young man with a big smile and easygoing way that earned him the nickname “The Mayor” from his family. He was a merchandiser for Coca-Cola and was at Wal-Mart to stock the shelves with soda. As always, he said hello to everyone, but the shy and beautiful girl working behind the optometry counter caught his eye. He was 23. She was 19.
“The day he met her, he was like a little schoolboy,” said Mike’s best friend, Derek N. Knight, of Exeter. “He knew he had found the perfect woman. He sounded like he won the lottery.” Sandy Leocadio didn’t say much to Mike, but she left a note on his Coca-Cola car saying she thought he was nice.
“She was quiet and young and drop-dead gorgeous,” said Paula A. McLaughlin, Mike’s sister, who would later be Sandy’s maid of honor. “She came from a strict Portuguese family.” But Sandy also had a tattoo on her arm, a love of heavy-metal music, and a gift for fashion that fueled her professional aspirations.
Sandy had always been trendy. As a girl, she’d slip out of her home in conservative clothes and change into her own stylish creations once she was out of view. Sandy became a visual merchandiser for Cherry & Webb, and eventually The Gap. When The Gap’s fashion sense didn’t suit her, Sandy altered it, like the time she slit the legs of her Gap jeans, filled the opening with red material and wore them to a Gap corporate meeting.
McLaughlin said Sandy was “head over heels” for Mike. Their interests were identical. Like her, Mike loved tattoos and ’80s metal music. He freely admitted his musical preferences were stuck in a time warp.
Their wedding in 2001 was unforgettable, just the way Sandy wanted it. Sandy unleashed all of her fashion and creative skills on her wedding. She designed her own dress, a tea-stained gown with a long train. She carried an old bible and a rosary instead of flowers. She designed the jewelry worn by Mike and the wedding party. She also designed her bridesmaids’ dresses, which were made of an iridescent bronze raincoat material and topped with jean coats.
The reception took place at the Great Hall, the former Central Congregational Church in Fall River, where Lizzie Borden once attended church and where Aerosmith taped a video — facts that delighted both Sandy and Mike. “She wanted her wedding to become famous,” McLaughlin said. Sandy, who still carried photos of her nuptials, hoped to be a wedding planner someday.
Nine years after they met, they often held hands and Sandy still sat on Mike’s lap. The couple were inseparable. The evening of Feb. 20 was shaping up to be a wonderful night, combining everything the couple loved: tattoos, rock ‘n’ roll, and each other. At 6 p.m., they dipped into their “tattoo fund” and went to a Warwick shop to get flames etched into Mike’s upper arm. It was his birthday gift. He had about nine tattoos, including a profile of Sandy.
At the tattoo parlor, Doors of Perception, they met Jack Russell, the lead singer of Great White who was also getting a tattoo. Mike was flabbergasted to meet one of his teen idols. He called his sister and two close friends from his cell phone. “He sounded like he was 12 years old,” Knight said.
Mike knew all of Great White’s songs, even the obscure ones. Russell was impressed, and he put Mike and Sandy’s names on the VIP list to his show that night.
McLaughlin said she’s grateful they died together. “We picture them together, like a bright light,” she said. “Together forever. A perfect love.”
×
July 21, 1965 — February 20, 2003
While on a visit to New York City with friends, Sarah Jane Telgarsky noticed an elderly woman on the subway whose shoelaces were untied. “Nobody usually talks to each other on the subway, but Sarah couldn’t ignore this lady — she just went right over and tied her shoes,” her brother Joseph recalls. Sarah, of Plainfield, Conn., spent most of her time helping other people — both professionally and in her private life.
As a licensed practical nurse at the Southeastern Mental Health Authority in Norwich, Sarah helped people with mental illness make the transition from institutions to living in the community. Sarah was an upbeat, strong-willed person with a great sense of humor. She loved dancing, gardening and decorating her home, Joseph says. “I never met anybody that didn’t like her,” says another brother, Aloysius, of Norwich.
Sarah, 37, was a caring mother to her daughter, 18-year-old Sarah Jane Ballard, Joseph said. She was constantly setting new goals for herself; she worked her way up to her current job, having started in a clerical position, and was taking classes for her RN degree. “No matter what problems she faced in her life, she always bounced back, she never stopped trying,” Joseph said.
Sarah went to The Station with her ex-husband, Craig Ballard, who had won free tickets to the Great White concert. Ballard, 41, of Plainfield, is in critical condition at UMASS/Worcester. Sarah will also be missed by her coworkers and clients at the mental health agency, said director John Simsarian. “She was always smiling — you could just feel the positive energy radiating from her,” he said.
×
November 3, 1961 — February 20, 2003
The things Scott Griffith cherished most in his life were his 13-year-old daughter, Kacie Griffith, and his custom-made white Gibson Les Paul guitar. He loved his daughter so much, her mother said, that he pleaded to bring Kacie with him when the computer security company he worked for gave him a promotion that meant a move to Rhode Island. “It killed me to say yes, but I was proud of him,” said Loree Griffith, of Phoenix, his former common-law wife.
Scott Griffith, 41, had been in West Warwick about seven months, but rarely went out at night, she said. He went to The Station because he was friends with Great White’s lead singer, Jack Russell; Kacie stayed around the corner from their house with a friend.
Officials told Loree that Scott’s body was found by the club’s door. She believes he stayed inside to help others out over the crush of people, then was overcome by the smoke.
Scott, who grew up in Huntington, Calif., had spent two decades playing for bands in southern California before relocating to Rhode Island. “He’s been playing since he was 12, he’s been in many, many bands, he’s done studio work, he writes songs for bands, he’s just the most incredible, talented musician,” Loree Griffith said.
Their daughter shares that talent, and has been learning to play the keyboard, singing, and writing songs with her father, Loree said.
Scott had gone through a rough patch in his life several years ago, but had “cleaned himself up real good” and taken computer classes that led him to his current job, with Guardent, she said.
He brought with him the custom-made guitar that Loree had given him about 15 years ago. Its mother-of-pearl finish and gold inlay had yellowed with time, but his affection for it had not waned. He used to joke that he wanted to be buried with the guitar. But Loree said he would want his daughter, the budding rocker, to have it now.
×
1975 — February 20, 2003
The red Ford Mustang was more than a car. It was a gift. Charles Sweet wanted to hand the keys to his son Shawn and hear the engine rumble to life like a symphony. “I wanted to give him something I never had.” So he found a good deal, a car that had been repossessed. He handed the man a check. The man said no. It would have to be cash. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what. Give me five minutes.’ I went to the bank and got the check cashed,” Charles recalled. “I said, ‘OK, my friend, all I want from you is the title and the receipt that the car is paid for.’ ” This was for his son, after all. He remembered Shawn’s reaction: “Oh my God, Dad, thanks.”
When Shawn was much younger, he had other wants. At various times, there were a hamster, a dove and a canary. One time, he wanted turkeys. His father said a couple of turkeys would be fine. But his son was thinking big.
“So I got these 12 or 13 turkeys,” Charles said. “Each one grew to like 30 pounds or so — and I had 12 of them in my backyard.” This was for his son, after all.
He remembered that Shawn, 28, had many pursuits common to young men. He lifted weights, with some friendly competition from his 24-year-old brother, Daniel. He liked to go skiing in Vermont and New Hampshire. And he was a traveler, visiting the Caribbean, Bermuda, Florida and Las Vegas.
Shawn graduated from Silver Lake High School in Pembroke in 1992 and attended but did not finish studies at both Massasoit Community College in Brockton, and Quincy College. But he did finish the Boston Marathon in 1991. And those who knew him say he ran his best race up the management ladder of the Stop & Shop supermarket in Quincy, Mass. He started at the store when he was 15. Nearly 14 years later, Shawn was an assistant manager. “He was known as a real team player who always served as a mentor to newcomers and to others,” said company spokeswoman Kelly O’Connor.
While at Stop & Shop, Shawn would regularly call home to see whether there was anything he should pick up for the family. He was always helping; for example, lugging home logs for the family’s wood-burning stove.
On Feb. 26, at St. Thecla’s Church in Pembroke, Charles and his wife, Carol, attended their son’s funeral Mass. Charles estimates that a thousand people came to honor his son’s memory, including a soldier who returned from Afghanistan just for the funeral. Five priests, two of them Shawn’s uncles, were on the altar. And the red Mustang? Shawn hadn’t driven it for years, growing up and moving on to a different car. The car wasn’t really the point.
It was about Charles and his son, after all. “I walk outside and I keep thinking, ‘When is he coming home?’ “
1968 — February 20, 2003
When it came to his work, tattooing, no detail escaped Skott C. Greene.
“I think what he loved most was when someone would come in with an idea, a far-out scheme, and he would put it on them and make it happen,” says a friend and employee Brian O’Donnell. “He loved to do the big crazy pieces because he loved the detail.”
He also loved the band Deep Purple, the movie Planet of the Apes, and the television show Lost in Space. In fact, he loved the robot from Lost in Space so much he had it tattooed on the inside of his right arm. “He was the biggest Deep Purple fan,” Brian said. “He thought that in essence their musicianship was the greatest in the world.”
Roughly 16 months ago, Skott got a chance at his dream when he opened Doors of Perception Tattoo, 709 Quaker Lane in West Warwick. His wife, Sandi, co-owned and managed the shop. “That was his dream; he wanted to own his own parlor, and we did it,” Sandi said. “He has been drawing since he was two, his family tells me. You couldn’t even have a piece of scrap paper without him drawing something beautiful.” Before owning his own shop, Skott worked for nine years as a tattoo artist at Electric Ink, in East Providence. “He was a perfectionist when it came to his art,” Sandi said. “Obviously you can’t erase it. No tattoo ever left that shop without being perfect.”
Skott, 35, was known for his excellent tattoo portraits, a reputation that ultimately led him to The Station that Thursday night. Jack Russell, the lead singer of the band Great White, had called several tattoo shops looking for a great portrait artist, Sandi said.
Russell ended up at Skott’s parlor. “He tattooed a kind of heart with the name Sue in it,” Sandi said. “He tattooed it kind of on his pelvic area.” A pleased Russell put Skott and Brian on the guest list for the show. Sandi decided not to go.
“At least in my eyes, I am glad to see so many people walking around with his artwork,” Sandi said. “There is no greater memorial. You can have pictures, drawings, but if you are wearing his work, there is no greater honor, and I have told his customers that.”
×
October 14, 1973 — February 20, 2003
Stacie J. Angers was always surrounded by friends, drawn to her joyful personality. Lisa Cooper met Stacie through a mutual friend when they were in high school. More than a decade later, they still talked on the phone often. During their conversations — always long — Lisa would hear the clicks of call-waiting as Stacie’s other friends beepedin. “I considered her my best friend,” Lisa says. “I think Stacie had a lot of best friends.”
Nicole Lovett met Stacie one day at lunch, in the high school cafeteria in Auburn, Mass. They were sitting at the same table, and Stacie asked Nicole for some of her French fries. That brief encounter blossomed into a friendship that lasted more than 15 years. “She had a way of making the simplest things extraordinary,” Nicole says.
At Stacie’s wake, a thousand people showed up. “Every person she ever came in contact with, she managed to keep in touch with,” Nicole said. Great White was one of Stacie’s favorite bands. She’d seen them in concert several times.
Stacie, 29, was always running late. When her family heard there’d been a fire at The Station, they prayed Stacie had come late and had been listening from the back of the room, near the door. Then they saw the video footage. Stacie was in the front row.
In the collages of photographs that fill her parents’ living room, Stacie is pictured most often with her fiancé, Michael Wunschel. “They just had this strong, strong love for one another,” said Stacie’s father, Leonard Angers.
Stacie and Mike had been dating for eight years, and engaged for three. They were going to be married Aug. 14, 2004. A childhood love of Charlie’s Angels and mystery novels had turned into a career as a private investigator, and Stacie had spent seven years working for Insight Investigations in Worcester, where she lived.
It was a demanding career, but Stacie still found time to maintain literally hundreds of friendships, and to help those she didn’t know. She had volunteered at a soup kitchen, walked to raise money for cancer research, tutored children at a juvenile detention center, and served as a mentor in the Big Sisters program. And she made sure to come home for dinner with her parents once a week.
“She was very busy,” her friend Lisa said. “But she was always there when you needed her.”
×
May 10, 1981 — February 20, 2003
Stephen M. Libera, 21, of North Kingstown, was a true gentleman. “He was one who would open a door and hold it for you when you went through,” said Frances Cherry, Stephen’s supervisor at the Sovereign Bank on Centerville Road in Warwick. Stephen had worked there as a teller since June. “He hadn’t been with us for very long,” Cherry said, “but he was very important to us.”
A 1999 graduate of Bishop Hendricken High School, Stephen had taken some time off after high school, she said, but had recently returned to classes at the Community College of Rhode Island. On the weekends, he worked as a waiter at Longhorn Steakhouse. He was hoping to graduate and later become an accountant, Cherry said.
Stephen’s coworker at the bank, Cheryl Augustine — whose son was in Libera’s graduating class — recalled him as “lean and tall,” a handsome young man who loved Subway sandwiches so much that coworkers routinely saved him coupons for the chain.
He spent a lot of time with his family, Augustine said — his father, John J. Libera, his mother, Joanne, and his sisters and brother, Lisa, Amy and Andrew.
Stephen also loved music, Augustine said. A guitarist, his tastes ranged from classical to jazz to rock ‘n’ roll. Cherry said Stephen sometimes went to concerts at The Station. That Thursday afternoon, she said, she heard him talking to a customer, telling him about a show he was going to see at the club that night. He urged the customer to come along, she said, but the other man declined.
Cherry said her best memory of Stephen was of a “contest” they’d had together — each of them claiming to know the best Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island. To settle the contest, she said, they each took the other out to dinner at their restaurant of choice. “He bought my dinner, and I bought his,” she said. They’d planned to do it again, this time at rival steakhouses. But they never got the chance.
“He was a sweet young man,” Cherry said. “He was everything you would want your daughter to bring home.”
× June 20, 1963 — February 20, 2003
It was a far-out father-and-son event. Douglas Magness, a guitarist in a garage band, took his 12-year-old stepson to the civic center for a heavy-metal dose of glam and gothic rock. Black Sabbath headed the bill. KISS opened the show. Adolescent thin, with shoulder-length hair, Steven R. Mancini was enthralled.
“As soon as he could, he picked up a guitar and started playing,” Magness remembered. “He was self-taught.” The Providence-born musician grew up with his step-dad’s favorite artists, including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Steppenwolf. Along the way, he picked up some other favorites, like B.B. King and Eddie Van Halen.
Over a period of 11 years, Steven went to work in the seafood department at the Stop & Shop grocery store on Manton Avenue; started a band; and married Andrea L. Jacavone, the manager of a family business, Jacavone Garden Center on Atwood Avenue in Johnston.
Steven had no siblings. Andrea had 10. “Andrea was that person in every family who had hugs and kisses for everybody,” said her sister, Michele Pistocco. Together, Andrea and Steven “had this glow about them.”
The couple worked part time at The Station in West Warwick, checking IDs and doing other work. Steven also played guitar in a band. Then, one night, Steven discovered just how small Rhode Island can be. After talking to members of Skyhigh, a hard-rock house band, he discovered the band’s bassist was Keith A. Mancini — a distant cousin.
Keith had been playing in Skyhigh for more than a year. He also worked in the warehouse of the Rhode Island Novelty Co. in Johnston. Steven started a new band, Fathead, and Keith joined it. Fathead became a regular band at The Station, and on some Saturday nights, Steven, Andrea and Keith worked together at the club. The band was so good, Fathead opened for Great White on Feb. 20. After the gig, Steven, 39, and Andrea were going to Disney World with Douglas and Barbara, Steven’s mother.
It wasn’t unusual for the two couples to do things together. Magness built an addition — a second story — to his own house for Steven and Andrea. He even built a music room for Steven. “We were father and son and also the best of friends,” said Magness, who put down his own guitar, a Les Paul Sunburst, to make a living as a heavy equipment mechanic. “Steve was living his dream.”
×
1965 — February 20, 2003
Steve Blom had a Harley-Davidson in his kitchen.”It was his baby,” says his sister-in-law, Dawn Blom. “Aside from his baby,” she quickly adds. Because 12-year-old Steven Jr. was his father’s best friend. His dirt bike stood right next to the Harley, and the two spent many hours riding together.
Steve, 40, lived in the same Cranston neighborhood for the last 21 years. All the kids would hang out at his house, says Dawn, who lives a block away. He’d give them rides on the dirt bike, and in the summer they’d get out the hose and have mud fights, and Steve would get right into it with them. “He was a kid himself,” she says.
Her son’s friends have told him, “summers aren’t ever going to be the same.” Steve, a self-employed painter, was always in a good mood, always laid-back and fun to be around. “I never saw him angry,” Dawn says. She can’t stress enough “what a good father he was.”
Steve Jr. lived with his father during the week and his mother on weekends. When he was at one parent’s house, he would always call the other to say goodnight. Now he calls his uncle Kevin from his mom’s. Kevin Blom, who was injured in the fire, has put plans to move to Florida on hold to be here for Steve’s son.
Steve loved motorcycles so much, he used to say he wanted a Harley procession for his funeral. So that’s what Dawn and her husband, Steve’s brother Allen, tried to arrange. She contacted the Ocean State H.O.G. (for Harley Owners Group) “and they all showed up at his wake” — at least 30 people. Because it was winter, they couldn’t ride. But it would have meant a lot to Steve anyway, Dawn says. “It was the closest thing to what he would have wanted.” Club members told the Bloms that their first ride of the spring will be dedicated to Steve.
×
October 13, 1973 — February 20, 2003
Jaromir Housa remembers the moment his stepson, Nathan, slipped under the cold, deep waters of a mountain pool in New Hampshire. It was years ago. They were hiking with Nathan’s mother, Tammy Mattera-Housa, when they came upon a waterfall — beautiful, Housa recalled, but also dangerous. When Housa’s back was turned, Nathan fell in.
Tammy dove in after her son. “She just ran,” her husband said. “She got into the water and took him out.” It was the kind of person Tammy Mattera-Housa was, her family says. “If she could help anybody she would,” said Tammy’s mother, Diane Mattera.
Tammy, 29, divided her life between two passions: her work as a certified personal trainer, and her two sons, Nathan, now 9, and Nicholas, 2. Employed at two Cranston gyms — Lady of America and Body Language — Tammy’s dream was to open her own gym and design a fitness regimen for women and girls.
But she also cherished her family. The second-oldest of four siblings, Tammy had recently moved with her husband and sons into her parents’ house in Warwick. She shared a crazy sense of humor with her younger sister, Gina. Only a few weeks ago, during a snowstorm, their mother dared them to run across the street and back with no shoes or socks — and wearing only boxer shorts — for a dollar each.
Because of her children, Tammy didn’t go out very often in the evenings. When she heard that Great White would be playing at The Station, however, she decided to go with a friend, Erin Whelan of Coventry. It was a band she’d always loved. She told her husband she’d be back by midnight. By that time, her family had already heard of the fire. Jaromir Housa rushed to the club, only to find it in flames. Whelan survived. Tammy did not.
“I believe she didn’t get out because she was helping,” Jaromir Housa said, through tears. “I know her personality. She was helping.” And then into Housa’s mind came the memory of a mountain waterfall, and he told the story of that other, triumphant rescue.
That day in New Hampshire, he said, when Tammy emerged from the pool, she was bruised and bleeding. She was holding Nathan. She had saved her son’s life. “She didn’t think once,” Jaromir Housa said. “She just jumped.”
×
October 19, 1972 — February 20, 2003
Terry Rakoski, 30, had just gotten her first passport. She and her husband, Richard, were planning a long-awaited honeymoon just as soon as he returned from military duty in Afghanistan. Theresa L. Serpa married Richard H. Rakoski Jr. on June 29, one week before he was sent to Afghanistan with the 772nd Military Police Company. The couple had planned the wedding for this year, but when he was called for active duty, they pushed up the date, according to Terry’s friend and coworker Alan Medeiros.
“After the wedding, she went running around showing everybody the photos,” recalled another coworker from Copley Controls in Canton, Mass. They tried to reassure her that he would be safe overseas. “I remember when he first left, I just kept telling her, he’ll be fine, he’ll come home to you,” one friend said.
Terry’s friends say she managed to keep up a positive attitude. She organized a company program that sent shaving cream, batteries, and other supplies to the soldiers in Afghanistan, one friend said. Terry was a meticulous worker in her detail-oriented job as a quality assurance inspector, Medeiros said. She was also an expert pool player, who played once a week through the American Pool Association League, and “a real rocker,” he said. But she also had a softer side, studying the Bible over lunch, playing cribbage, and sharing stories about her cats with coworkers.
Thursday nights, Terry and her sister Christina DiRienzo would get together with their mother, Patricia Pina, for dinner and games of kitty whist. “Both of my girls loved to play cards,” Patricia said. “I’m going to miss those card nights, believe me.” Christina also died in the fire. Recalling Terry’s “daredevil” streak, Patricia tells how Terry went sky-diving with a group from work, and took her on a hot-air balloon ride for her birthday. “She always tried to outdo herself,” Patricia said.
Terry also had exciting adventures planned: this summer, she planned to go white-water rafting. The Taunton apartment that Terry and Richard shared was very tidy, according to her mother. “Terry was a neat-nick: a place for everything, and everything in its place,” she said. Terry kept in touch with Richard overseas through the Internet and by cell phone. The couple were planning their honeymoon, a trip to Niagara Falls, Canada, for this spring. Richard came back to the United States early, to make arrangements for Terry’s funeral.
×
April 16, 1964 — February 20, 2003
In almost every photograph of Thomas A. Barnett scattered throughout his parents’ living room in West Greenwich, he is goofing around, placing two small green apples in front of his eyes or screwing up his mouth in a silly smile. “We could never get him to pose for a regular picture,” said his sister, Gerry L. Childers, of Hawaii. “Tommy was the sparkle in our family.”
He was 15 years younger than Gerry, 16 years younger than his brother, Ray I. Barnett Jr. of Coventry, and 17 years younger than his eldest sister, Marjorie A. Farrell of Plainfield, Conn. The family doted on Tom and adopted his baby words into their vocabulary. They still call soda dub-da, as Tom pronounced it as a toddler.
“He was a bonus,” Marjorie said. “We used to say it must have been a little tough for him, having three moms and two dads.” He treated nephews just a few years younger than him like brothers, and showered his family with love and Christmas presents each year.
His family described Tom, 38, as “hard-working and hard-playing.” He babied his midnight-blue Corvette convertible, was a voracious reader and worked long hours as a self-employed construction worker for 20 years. When he came through the door on Barnett Lane each night, he always had a couple of new jokes for his parents, Romelle M. (Bagshaw) and Ray I. Barnett.
Tom frequently imitated accents. Once, Marjorie called him and heard a British accent on the answering machine. So she did her accent and said some “fresh” things. “I wondered why he never called me back, and asked him about it,” Marjorie said. “Tommy said, ‘Marge, that wasn’t me. I’m doing an Indian accent now.’ ”
Tom did not meet his daughter, Angel O. Amitrano of Coventry, until she was 9. They grew close over the years, discovering they made the same faces, laughed at the same things, were both grumpy in the mornings. But it was not until last December that the two said “I love you” to each other. “I am so grateful I got a chance to say it back,” said Angel, now 21. “My heart leapt. I didn’t realize I’d been waiting 21 years to hear those words.”
Her father, at 5-foot-11, stood seven inches taller than she, and when they hugged, her head fit perfectly under his chin. “He gave the best hugs,” she said. “The kind that just encapsulate your whole body.”
Tom went to The Station that night with his girlfriend, Jessica Studley, and his best friend since kindergarten, Jason Morton. The two men lived less than a half-mile apart along Route 102. They were regulars at the club, where they often went to hear live heavy-metal music. The two were so close that Tom had his own set of slippers at Jason’s house — gorillas that screech when you squeeze their ears.
Jessica, who was Jason’s cousin, had stepped outside to grab cigarettes from her car when she saw flames shooting from the club. She didn’t worry at first, the Barnetts said, because she’d left Tom and Jason by the front door. “From the first day of kindergarten to the day they died, they’ve been together. That was the friendship,” Tom’s mother said. “I think it would have lasted if they’d lived to 80.”
×
January 17, 1976 — February 20, 2003
Thomas Marion had dreams of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. But the 27-year-old Wal-Mart employee — a furniture specialist — didn’t let his musical ambitions become a distraction on the job. He told his boss about his band only once or twice. And he didn’t share too many details. Mr. Marion, of Westport, Mass., focused on the task at hand. “It didn’t matter what he had on his plate for the day — he did whatever he had to do,” recalled Kendra Goodwin, an assistant manager.
On his last shift at the Wal-Mart in Raynham, Mass., Mr. Marion prepared merchandise for a sale. He unloaded four pallets of stock. He kept his customers happy. “He was awesome with his customers,” said Goodwin. “They loved him.” Mr. Marion had been with Wal-Mart for six years and had risen to the position of furniture department manager.
A 1994 graduate of Diman Regional Vocational Technical School, he had specialized training in furniture and cabinet-making. He had built entertainment centers, display cases and kitchen cabinets, according to Ronald Silvia Jr., a Diman teacher. Silvia remembered Mr. Marion as a quiet teenager with a slight frame and bushy hair. “He was a good kid,” he said. “Never any trouble.”
Even back then, Mr. Marion liked to strum the guitar. By the time he was 27, he was an accomplished guitarist playing in a band. Goodwin learned of the furniture manager’s taste for heavy-metal and alternative music over the course of several overnight shifts at Wal-Mart. He told her he occasionally went to concerts at The Station in West Warwick.
×
1973 — February 20, 2003
Thomas J. Fleming was quiet at first, but once he knew you, he was a friend for life. Friends were so important to Tom that he would call just to talk about the happenings in another friend’s life. He was the one who kept people in touch, and he was always there to offer help.
His mother and others who knew him say that’s probably why Tom wanted to work with teenagers, as a physical-education teacher and coach. A 1990 graduate of Auburn (Mass.) High School, Tom, 30, had been substitute-teaching for about two years at his alma mater, waiting for a position to open as he gained experience. He had also applied for a softball coaching position.
“He was one of those guys who loved to be around the kids,” said Bill Garneau, Auburn High’s athletic director. “We’d sit down after class and talk. He was always asking questions.” Garneau had also known Tom as a student. In those days, Tom stood out, his red hair flowing down past his shoulders. It stayed that way until his mid-20s, when he cut it short.
“I made suggestions” about shorter hair, said his mother, Judith Fleming. “It wasn’t until one day that he decided. . . . He pulled in the driveway one day — I didn’t even recognize who it was.” Maggie Dinsdale, a friend from Auburn High, said Tom cut his hair just before her wedding. Tom was there to congratulate the newlyweds, and he was there again when Maggie and her husband had a baby daughter. The couple didn’t own a nice camera, so Tom insisted they borrow his to capture their daughter’s start in life.
He was there again when Maggie had a car accident in the parking lot at Sears, where they both worked for a time. “He was the first person out in the parking lot seeing if I was OK,” she said. “The guy was just yelling and screaming at me, and Tom said ‘Back off — it’s not her fault.’ ”
Maggie and another close high school friend, Todd Shaw, said they prayed after hearing of the fire at The Station, hoping Tom hadn’t gone. Tom loved ’80s music. He and Todd had attended about a hundred shows together, Todd estimates.
They would check out the bands, and they would look up at the ceilings of the clubs to check out the sprinkler equipment — the kind that might have saved lives at The Station. Tom had worked for a time with Todd and his father, who own the RC Shaw Sprinkler Co., in Worcester.
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May 17, 1962 — February 20, 2003
Joe Sosnosky hired Thomas P. Medeiros to work at Bradford Original Soap Works 20 years ago. He never regretted the decision. “He had a really bright, bubbly personality,” said Sosnosky, executive vice president of the company. “He was a very caring person who would help anybody. And his work ethic was just wonderful.”
In all the years that Mr. Medeiros, 40, had been employed at the company, he never missed a day of work, Sosnosky said. And because many of Mr. Medeiros’s family members — including his brother and two sisters — also work at Bradford, he was truly part of the fabric of daily life there. “There are people here who are crying every day when they stop and think that he is gone,” Sosnosky said.
Mr. Medeiros had been a star runner in high school, Sosnosky said he always prided himself on keeping in excellent physical shape. He could run like the wind, recalled House Speaker William J. Murphy, who went to West Warwick High School with Mr. Medeiros and was a teammate on the boys’ cross-country team. “Tommy was the best runner that ever came from West Warwick High School,” Murphy said. Mr. Medeiros broke many local and state track records, and was named Most Outstanding Athlete of West Warwick in his senior year.
Andrea Silva, one of his nieces, said he was more like a brother than an uncle. A passionate fan of the New England Patriots — and their former quarterback Drew Bledsoe — Mr. Medeiros was planning a trip to Buffalo, N.Y., next year just to get his name on a football helmet he had inscribed with other Pats’ autographs, she said.
“If you met my uncle, you’d love him right away,” she said, recalling that on a hot summer day, he used his work break to cut his father’s lawn. “He’d do anything for anybody,” Silva said. “There aren’t enough words to describe him.”
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June 15, 1969 — February 20, 2003
She was known as Mrs. T. It was because of all the gold jewelry Tina M. Ayer would wear every day — crosses and pendants hanging around her neck and a ring on each finger, just like Mr. T, the TV star from the ’80s. Did she have any favorites? “They were all her favorites,” says her 15-year-old daughter, Kayla Marie D. Abbenante Ayer.
With the jewelry and the blond highlights in her black hair, the diminutive Ms. Ayer, 33, was hard to miss. And impossible to ignore. “She loved to talk,” said Kayla, as she, her aunt, Desiree Phillips, and a friend recounted stories. “She was so outgoing.”
Born and raised in Warwick, Tina lived with her daughter in the Oakland Beach section of the city. She also had an 8-year-old son, Daniel N. White. Kayla and Tina were more like friends than mother and daughter.
Kayla remembers when she got her tongue pierced last year. Her mother came with her and even joked that she’d get hers pierced too. “But she looked through the window watching me get it done, and she was crying she was so scared,” said Kayla.
She was generous and compassionate, but it was her goofiness that was so endearing, said Phillips. Tina loved rock ‘n’ roll, especially those ’80s “hair bands” and metal groups. She’d often go to karaoke bars to sing their songs and even sang at her brother’s wedding.
She loved that rock star image, too. When she wasn’t at her job at the Fairfield Inn, in Warwick, she’d put on a pair of Levi’s and a leather jacket and ride Harley-Davidsons with her friends. She dreamed of buying her own bike one day. “She was definitely a Harley babe,” said Phillips.
Kayla fidgeted with the rings on her fingers as she listened. Some were her mother’s. Tina was wearing most of her jewelry the night of the fire. Her father, Steven W. Ayer, has it now. Kayla says when she gets it back, she’ll take off all her own jewelry and wear her mother’s. “And then she’ll be Mrs. T junior,” said Phillips.
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1970 — February 20, 2003
Family members laugh about the little mischief Tracey Romanoff, 33, of Coventry, used to get into as a kid. When she was still in diapers, she would crawl up on a chair and open the front door when her parents weren’t looking. Once, she escaped and the police found her walking down her street. Her parents took to putting a crab shell on the door latch to scare her away from breaking out. “She was a hell-raiser,” says her father, Terry Romanoff, laughing. “You name it, she did it.” It was just that independent spirit that Tracey’s family loved about her. She was a good mom, they say, who loved getting tan at the beach, sitting in her Jacuzzi, partying, playing softball, and music — the louder the better.
Tracey had two children, Joshua, 10, and Lindsey, 8, both students at Washington Oak Elementary School, where she was a teacher’s assistant.She also worked in the Coventry office of H & R Block. Last summer, she married Daniel Frederickson, 37, a career non-commissioned officer in the Navy stationed at the submarine base in Groton, Conn.
Tracey was a member of the Coventry Girls’ Softball All-Stars team that finished ninth in the 1985 national tournament for the 13- to 15-year-olds division. A shortstop and a second baseman while she was at Coventry High School, she was named to the All-State team. She continued to play in a local women’s softball league in which she developed a tight circle of friends, including her best friend, Chris Van Leuven, according to her sister Lori Romanoff.
Tracey was the oldest of Susan and Terry Romanoff’s three girls. Lori Romanoff and Wendi McDonald live in Florida, but they say the distance didn’t keep them from being close to their older sis. “She was a free spirit,” Wendi McDonald said. “She was independent and very strong,” Lori Romanoff said. “She loved that she owned her own home and did it by herself.” Tracey and her husband planned to move to his home state, Washington, this year. Dan wanted to build them a log home.
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June 15, 1963 — February 20, 2003
Tracy F. King, a 39-year-old father of three, was a big, cheerful man with a funny knack for balancing heavy objects on his chin.
People who had seen him do it called him “The Canoe Man,” because a 17-foot canoe was the first thing he ever balanced on his chin for millions of late-night television viewers. That was on The Late Show With David Letterman, in 1993, where viewers saw Mr. King prove himself the rare guest who could stand toe-to-toe with Letterman in an interview.
Balancing things was an odd talent that Mr. King acquired by accident in his youth, when a surgeon operated on his right eardrum. “They messed around with my equilibrium and I came out of it with an acute sense of balance,” he told a reporter in 1993.
At 6 feet, 2 inches tall and 300 pounds, Mr. King had a solid base for balancing refrigerators, motor scooters, desks, ladders, Christmas trees — and, on German TV once, a woman sitting cross-legged in a chair.
He enjoyed performing on television here and abroad, and at county fairs, art festivals, hospitals and schools. He lived in Warwick with his wife, Evelyn, and their sons, and spent his free time lifting weights, cooking, boating, fishing, and building radio-controlled model boats.
Mr. King’s friend and personal manager, Al Salzillo of Nightside Entertainment, said of the balancing act, “He was so into what he did. He was very, very proficient in knowing everything there was to know about equilibrium and balance, and being able to present it to kids.”
“I can’t recall being around him even once when he was down or dejected,” Salzillo said. “Anywhere we sent him to work, we had people call up and say, this man is one of the most phenomenal people — as a man, not only as an entertainer, but as a person — we can’t wait to have him back.”
Mr. King, one of seven brothers and sisters, was born in Providence and lived most of his life in Warwick. He was graduated from Toll Gate High School in 1982 and later joined the Army, serving four years with the Military Police, in Germany, Japan and Texas.
A licensed arborist, he went to work for the city in the spring of 2000. At the time of his death, he was a laborer in the Highway Division, and a member of Local 1651 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He was working his part-time security job at The Station club when the fire broke out.
Mr. King’s boss at his day job, Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, said later, “We’re being told that he went back in to help people get out of the fire, and that would fit in with his generous spirit and his attitude toward people.”
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September 4, 1971 — February 20, 2003
Ty Longley loved The Simpsons, running, boogie boarding in the ocean, writing in his journals and the Pittsburgh Steelers. Perhaps most of all, the 31-year-old guitarist for Great White loved playing music. “I can tell you he LIVED for that stage and for his fans,” wrote his girlfriend, Heidi Peralta, on Mr. Longley’s Web site, tylongley.com. “He always wanted to travel and be a dad and soon a husband BUT still tour.” Peralta is expecting the couple’s child.
In a journal entry for October 2002, Mr. Longley wrote about his experiences on the road with Great White, from having dinner at the Space Needle in Seattle to checking out fall foliage in Massachusetts. “I’m grateful for the time I do get out here and know it’s truly a blessing to utilize my gift,” he wrote.
Mr. Longley, 31, was born in Sharon, Pa., and grew up in Ohio before moving to California to try to make it in the music business. At the time of his death, he was living in Northridge, Calif. But he never totally forgot his Pennsylvania roots — a biographical sketch on the Great White Web site reveals a die-hard Pittsburgh Steelers fan: “Steelers rule!” His first musical gig was with a band called Chains, in Youngstown, Ohio. “God bless my family for enduring that one,” he wrote.
Mr. Longley joined Great White in 2000, when the band was looking to replace founding guitarist Mark Kendall. He toured with the band in 2001, and when lead singer Jack Russell launched a solo career, he hired Mr. Longley as a member of his touring band. Kendall re-joined Great White last year, but the band decided to use a two-guitar lineup and keep Mr. Longley on.
In a tribute to Mr. Longley on the Great White Web site, band manager Paul Woolnough wrote about Mr. Longley’s dedication to his music. The last time they spoke, Woolnough wrote, they discussed a solo CD that Longley hoped to record when he got back to California. Knight Records, Great White’s label, is planning to release an album of Mr. Longley’s music in the near future.
But Woolnough also wrote about Mr. Longley’s personal side — his daily trip to Starbucks, where he would linger and write in his journals, his enthusiasm for running, and his devotion to The Simpsons. (Woolnough would record the shows while Mr. Longley was on the road so he wouldn’t miss an episode.)
Jason Williams, bassist for the band Trip, which was opening for Great White, said Mr. Longley was a pleasure to be around on the road: “As far as guys go he was one of the greatest guys you would ever hope to meet in the world,” Williams said. “He was constantly keeping people laughing on the bus…he never was moody, he always had a bright chipper personality every day.”
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1964 — February 20, 2003
When Victor Stark’s father died many years ago, he became a father figure to his little brother, Tony. When Tony was paralyzed in a car crash in North Carolina in 1998, Victor became his lifeline. “He kept a constant vigil and wouldn’t leave my bedside,” Tony wrote in a tribute to his brother. “Even when I was on life support, I remember hearing his enthusiastic voice praying for me to fight for my life.” After Tony was discharged from the hospital, Victor visited him regularly. He vacuumed, took him out on the town and cheered him on as he pursued a bachelor’s degree in psychology.
Victor, 39, of Mashpee, Mass., took pride in his versatility. In fact, he claimed he had worked more than 50 different jobs. “His main focus in life was working,” said his 25-year-old brother, who lives in Taunton. “If somebody needed something, he’d do it. He worked a lot.”
Victor’s latest job was bagging groceries, collecting grocery carts and doing whatever else his coworkers needed at the Shaw’s supermarket in Falmouth, Mass. He had worked at the market for at least five years and was so proud of his job that he wore his uniform shirt off-duty. Deep into astrology, Victor tended to blame bad luck on the alignment of the planets. “If something bad happened, he would blame it on ‘Mercury’s retrograde,’ ” says Tony.
Victor, a graduate of Dennis-Yarmouth High School, was a devoted follower of the Boston Red Sox and a hardcore rock music fan. Rose Weichels, a close friend, said Victor had anticipated the Great White concert for months and had secured three tickets for his friends. He went to the concert with Donald Roderiques, 46, also of Mashpee, and Milton “Skip” Servais Jr. of East Falmouth. Roderiques died in the fire. Servais was badly burned. Both Weichels and Tony Stark believe they can see Victor in the video that recorded the start of the fire. He stands out because of his height. He is pointing to the smoke and directing people to the exits, Weichels said. “He is a hero,” she said
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September 27, 1962 — February 20, 2003
Walter “Waldo” Rich was a truck hobbyist who spent many of his leisure hours tinkering with the various pickups in his small fleet. Walter, 40, of Attleboro, even had a name for his favorite truck — a midnight blue Chevy S-10 with gray pinstripes. He called it “Dirty Deeds.” The name, painted in white letters on the truck’s tailgate, was inspired by one of Walter’s favorite songs, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” by AC/DC.
Walter began work on the truck about 12 years ago, about three years before the birth of his son, Christopher. “He built it himself — put it together from scratch,” said his wife, Kimberly, 34. The project extended long after Christopher learned how to walk. The truck won awards at several car shows. More recently, Walter had started customizing a second S-10. This one would boast a dual cab, Kimberly said. He also owned several other trucks.
During a recent snowstorm, Walter took out his plow and helped clear a neighbor’s driveway. The neighbor, Glenn Therriault, invited him to the Great White concert, Kimberly said. Walter was not a devoted Great White fan, but he adored ’80’s music. “He kind of liked it all,” his wife said. “There wasn’t any one particular band that he favored over the other.” Walter also liked snowmobiling and eating seafood — especially fish and chips.
A 1981 graduate of Attleboro High School, he had worked in maintenance at a Mass Electric substation on West Street, in Attleboro, for 17 years. He was a dedicated family man who liked to make people laugh, including Christopher, 9. The boy was often at his father’s side during the assembly of Dirty Deeds. “Ever since our son could walk, he’s been in that truck,” Kimberly said. “My son loved that truck because his father built it.”
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1961 — February 20, 2003
Billy Cartwright’s boss at the Providence Yarn Co. was a tough act to follow. So, when the man retired as warehouse manager a couple of years ago, Charles Samdperil, the owner of the company, wasn’t sure Cartwright could fill his shoes. “I said to Billy, do you think you could do this?” Samdperil recalled. “He took over and he felt good about the responsibility, and the more responsibility, the better he got.”
Things weren’t always so smooth with Billy, the only son of William H. Cartwright Jr. and the former Charlotte E. Collins, who died of cancer when Billy was 20. The Cartwrights had four girls, three born before Billy. “He gave me more headaches than all my daughters put together,” his father said.
As a boy, Billy used to worry his father sick by staying out late and not calling to say where he was. The elder Cartwright said he would call the police to find him. As Billy got older, however, he settled down. He still liked to camp and fish and ride motorcycles.
But he also had a girlfriend, Kristen Aris, whom he was hoping to marry. He had an apartment on the east side of Pawtucket, and had just bought a new van. Billy, 42, planned to register the van that Friday, and had asked his father to pick him up and drive him to work.
The elder Cartwright said he had a premonition his son was dead late Thursday night when television reported that there had been a devastating fire at a heavy-metal concert. After Billy’s death was confirmed, the elder Cartwright and his longtime companion, Doris Bryant, went to the Providence Yarn Co. to return Billy’s keys to the warehouse. There, they found his Yamaha motorcycle, as well as the clipboard folder he had used to keep track of shipments.
Samdperil said he and others had spent the days since Billy died going through the 30,000-square-foot warehouse looking for things — things that Billy would have been able to find immediately. “Even while we’re doing this, the name Billy keeps coming up.”
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August 25, 1966 — February 20, 2003
Billy C. Bonardi III, 36, loved to hang out with his parents and friends. He loved to eat. He loved rock ‘n’ roll. And he really liked cutting his grass. A business analyst at AAi Foster Grant in Smithfield, Billy lived in the same town he worked in, and just five minutes away from his parents, William C. and Dorothy E. Bonardi of Lincoln.
He would check in on his parents during the workweek and share a meal cooked by his mom. He loved lasagna. On the weekends, he stopped by again to go grocery shopping with his mother. Billy was the Bonardis’ only child, and even at 36, he always let them know where he was. “During meals he would fill us in on all the stuff he did and the funny things he and his friends did,” his mom recalled. “He kept us young by telling us what was going on with young people and the world.”
His dad said that when Billy covered the Providence Bruins hockey team for DSN Sports on WALE radio, he made a lot of friends. “He was only 5 foot 5 and those hockey guys were huge. They would always pick him out from the crowd of announcers to talk to,” Mr. Bonardi said. Billy’s house is filled with hockey sticks and memorabilia from his beloved Red Sox and Washington Redskins and mementos from Japan and China.
Billy fell in love with those countries on business trips for Burns of Boston a couple of years back. “The people he met there still send him cards and presents,” his father said. Carol Hartnett and Billy became fast friends while working at AAi Foster Grant.
“As only children we don’t have anybody else, so we bonded immediately like brother and sister,” said Hartnett, 37, of Johnston. They both loved rock ‘n’ roll, so they went to concerts together. Hartnett said Billy was a “fanatic for his lawn,” to the point where a friend once gave him a Yankee candle with a scent called “fresh cut grass.”
Salvatore Esposito, 32, met Billy when they both worked at Burns of Boston. Billy loved Esposito’s four-month-old baby “like he was his.” “He was always really caring. Put you first,” Esposito said. They both liked all kinds of rock ‘n’ roll, and often went to The Station. They were there together that Thursday night.
Esposito said that when he saw the fire race across the ceiling he grabbed Billy and they headed toward the exit, but he lost his grip on Billy in the crowd. “Every time we used to get together, Billy and I used to talk about what we did the time before. We’d laugh till it hurt. Billy left a lot of good memories for me.”
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