Trial by Fire by Scott James

Author:Scott James
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

JUSTICE

CHAPTER 46

ON DECEMBER 9, 2003, Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch announced that a grand jury had indicted the Derderian brothers and Daniel Biechele, the tour manager who ignited the fireworks. Each man faced two hundred counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts for each of the one hundred victims, under two different theories of law: one hundred counts of criminal negligence, and one hundred counts of misdemeanor manslaughter. One set of charges argued that the men had been grossly negligent, causing the deaths. The other legal theory was that the men had committed misdemeanor offenses that ultimately killed people. With Biechele that misdemeanor was the illegal use of fireworks, and for the Derderians it was in the installation of the flammable foam. If convicted, each count carried a prison sentence of up to thirty years.

“The words simply do not exist to describe the intense pain and immense grief that the victims and their families have endured in the 10 months since this tragedy occurred,” Lynch said in a statement. “As much as I wish that I could change the timing of the announcement—when the suffering of the victims and survivors will be intensified by having to go through the holidays without their loved ones—I cannot.”

Before announcing the indictments, at the same moment the men were arraigned in court, Lynch gathered the relatives of those killed at the West Valley Inn in West Warwick, across town from the nightclub site. Lynch wanted the victims’ families to hear the news directly from him before it went public, but there were also reports that prosecutors feared victims’ families might violently confront the accused at the courthouse, so families were lured to a different location.

Five hundred people crowded into a large banquet room, hoping for some measure of justice. Nothing could bring back their loved ones, but with the grand jury meeting for so many months there were high expectations that perhaps, for once, in a state with a notoriously corrupt legal system, the right thing would happen—that everyone culpable would be arrested.

Gina Russo sat in the assemblage, invited because Fred was her fiancé. In other meetings involving the families of those who perished in the fire, survivors were specifically excluded. An exception had been made for Gina this day.

It was one of the unfortunate truths of the nightclub tragedy that those whose lives were most impacted were bitterly divided into different camps, with some openly warring against others. Victims’ families resented survivors, even those critically hurt, and blamed them for others’ deaths.

“There were certain comments made that, ‘You pushed my loved one aside. My loved one died because you survived,’” said Jonathan Bell, chairman of the Station Family Fund charity. “They certainly don’t know it, and they don’t mean it. They just mean, ‘I’m experiencing a really deep loss, and your situation is different.’”

But Bell’s rational understanding of the emotions could not change the brazen hatred and unite everyone.

“They could never meet together,” said Gina, “because the victims’ families wanted to shoot the survivors, like you could not mix them.

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