By John Hill
Providence Journal
WEST WARWICK, R.I. — The Station nightclub fire, where 100 people died and hundreds more were hurt, will never be forgotten by those who were there or lost loved ones that February night. While many say they will never get over it, they have found a way to get along with it. Survivors and friends of survivors active in the effort to turn the nightclub site in West Warwick into a memorial park recount the emotional journeys that brought them from 2003 to 2018.
ROBIN PETRARCA
Robin Petrarca was in New York City three weeks ago, looking for some laughs in a comedy club. But for anyone who was in The Station nightclub on Feb. 20, 2003, she said, a night out triggers an awareness.
“As we’re going down the stairs to get into the comedy club, in the heart of Times Square, the first thought that goes through my mind: I come back and look and go: ‘Are there two exits down there?’” she said. “It’s just one of those things that’s ingrained in you.”
Petrarca was sitting near the bar that night in 2003, about five feet from a door, when the fire broke out.
She got out. Nine friends didn’t. That night is not a coherent memory for her, she said, but a sequence of moments when she was hyper-focused on finding her friends or helping those around her.
She had a cellphone that was working and handed it off to anyone who needed to call home and let their family know they were safe. Her bill was $646 that month, she said.
The tragedy, she said, heightened her appreciation of the life she was allowed, for whatever reason, to continue.
“You bury nine people in a period of less than two weeks,” she said, “and yeah, I think it affects you. Greatly.”
Now, she said, she smells the roses.
“Things that bother people ... you sit there and you shake your head and you go, if this is the worst thing that happens to me today, this month, this year, this decade, I mean, at that point it’s one of those things. It’s irrelevant.”
It took a while, she said, but she thinks she had found the way to move on from it but to keep it with her as well.
“Everyone carries baggage and I think at some point you figure out how to pack it and carry it with you,” she said.
Petrarca remembers one of the “most beautiful moments” she’s had. She took a photograph of the stone of a man who died and sent it to his daughter in California. She paused, her eyes tearing. “And I sent it to her and the best compliment I ever got was ‘oh, his hair’s fantastic.’”
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LISA DEL SESTO
For the first February in 15 years, Lisa Del Sesto said, she hasn’t had the nightmares.
Since 2003, the approach of the anniversary of the Station fire, where she and her twin sister, Cara Ann, got out unhurt while 100 others died and about 200 more were injured, was four weeks of dread.
But with last spring’s dedication of the memorial on the old nightclub site, Del Sesto said she thinks she has found a way not to forget, but to live with the memories.
She said she went into the club that night a naive, fun-loving 27-year-old and came out angry and feeling guilty.
She saw friends who had lost people they loved, others who had been burned and scarred by the fire, and felt embarrassed that she got out physically unharmed. “I would see the burn survivors, whom I’m lucky enough to call friends,” Del Sesto said. “In my head, I didn’t even belong with them because I walked out without a scratch.”
It took about five years to come to terms with that, she said.
“The first time I went to counseling, I made the therapist cry,” Del Sesto said. “I figured I was on my own at that point.”
For the first few years she shunned memorial ceremonies but eventually was convinced to go. It was there, she said, that she found the best therapists: others who had been in the fire.
“They would want to talk,” she said, “and they wouldn’t freak. That was the most important thing, they didn’t freak.”
Del Sesto said her life is told in three chapters now. The first was her life before Feb. 20, 2003. The second was the time from that night until the dedication of the memorial last spring. That day let her put a period on the last sentence of Chapter Two, she said. The third started that day.
“I needed for that day to come,” she said. “There had to be that period for me. It couldn’t continue another 10, 15 years, it couldn’t. It had to end, for me and it ended in the most beautiful way.”
GINA RUSSO
Gina Russo has no clear memory of how, with her hair on fire, she got out of the Station nightclub the night of Feb. 20, 2003. But 15 years later, she said, it’s time for her to move out of its shadow.
The fire left her with burns over 40 percent of her body, it incinerated her hair. Her fiancé, Alfred “Freddy” Crisostomi, who was behind her, pushing her toward the door, perished. She endured more than 50 operations.
She said she spent years after that in pain and anger. But with last year’s dedication of the Station Memorial Park on the site of the nightclub, she said she found that along with the scars, that night had provided her with a purpose in life and people she would otherwise never have known.
Today she is president of the Station Fire Memorial Foundation, the group that oversaw the construction of the memorial park. She wrote a book, meets with burn victims, talks to fire departments and fire safety groups across the country.
She sees telling the story of the Station fire as a way of preventing others from going through the same thing.
A California woman who had been injured in an accident and hadn’t left her house in five years wrote her, she said. She’d read Russo’s book, about how the fire left her “a bald chick,” and it convinced her to go back out into the world.
“It made me realize, I might be only one person, but my story and my injuries were making people listen,” she said.
After 15 years of it being a dominant part of her everyday life, she said she is ready for it to be a part of her past.
“I can’t do it for the rest of my life,” she said. “This is a massive part of my life. I look at my scars every day. But I don’t want it to define the rest of my life.
But she said she also wants to keep the people she has met from that night, who she sees as friends and not sharers of a horrible experience.
CHRISTINA PIMENTEL
Christina Pimentel wasn’t at the Station 15 years ago but she remembers the fire that killed 100 people because one of them was her uncle, Carlos Pimentel Sr. These days, she uses her job as a teacher at John F. Deering Middle School to make it so those who didn’t suffer so directly will remember it too.
When January comes each year, she starts a lesson, delicately, talking about The Station and how there was a fire there.
“I try to say it in the lightest way possible,” she said. " ... We talk about fire safety a bit, I don’t get too, too far into it.”
It started as part of the fundraising basketball games she organized at the school. That effort raised about $10,000 over seven years to help pay for the construction of the memorial park.
“At the opening of the park I had 100 students from my school come, and I had to explain it all ... so I gave them their learning experience,” she said of last May’s dedication of the park on the site of the Station nightclub. “They all came ... so every single one of those hundred students held up a white rose and they represented one of the 100 [who died]. So that was huge.”
Her father has seven brothers, Pimentel said, and she was especially close to Carlos. He owned his own construction company, and he was often in the backyard with his sons, improving the landscape or building two ponds that he filled with koi fish.
The loss is still fresh for her cousins, she said, even 15 years later. Her father won’t visit the memorial, and it took her years to be able to drive down Cowesett Avenue, she said.
Taking her students to the memorial park and telling them what it means were ways of building that memory, she said. Fifteen years from now, she hopes, her students will go by the park, and have a memory, a connection, with the 100 people whose names and faces are etched into black granite squares arrayed throughout the park.
PAUL VANNER
After the investigation ended and prosecutors had no more questions, after reporters stopped calling and the years passed since that deadly night, the man who was the sound technician and stage manager at The Station nightclub was left with his thoughts.
And Paul Vanner didn’t like what he saw. “I found my soul was wanting.”
Vanner spoke about how his life derailed after 11:07 p.m. on Feb. 20, 2003. How he went from being a man with a job he loved and friends, to someone struggling with sobriety and guilt, suffering flashbacks at fire alarms and smoke-like fog.
One hundred people died, and hundreds more suffered. Vanner wonders whether he could have saved them.
When fireworks ignited the soundproofing foam on the stage wall, he ran for a fire extinguisher. He turned back to see the crowd bottle-necked at the stage.
“I had the fire extinguisher in my hand,” Vanner said. “It was crowded, and it was getting bad. I said to myself, we gotta go. I never thought it would get so bad.”
He told bartender Julie Mellini that they had to leave, and she and several patrons followed Vanner out the kitchen door. “I did not lead them out,” he said dismissively. “There was nothing heroic about what I did.”
Nothing lifts his despair. He wasn’t charged with a crime, but his thoughts punish him. He sees his actions as a verdict on his own humanity.
“A true hero would have gone for it,” Vanner said. “They all say I never would have stopped it, and I probably wouldn’t have. But I should have at least tried.”
In the aftermath, Vanner battled an addiction to crack cocaine and alcohol, which he used to cope but which cost him jobs and his driver’s license. Last year, he was charged with striking a woman for whom he was a caretaker. The charge is pending. Vanner has no excuses. “It was criminal,” he says.
He is now seven years sober from cocaine, although alcohol is a more “pestering problem,” he says. At 55, he lives with his parents and keeps to himself. He sees a court-ordered therapist, who has told him he has depression and PTSD. He tells her he wishes that he’d tried to extinguish the fire. Even if he couldn’t. Even if he died trying.
“It would have been my legacy,” Vanner said. “But instead, I chose to run like a common coward.”
Fifteen years since that terrible night. Vanner doesn’t know when the night will be over.