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c h a P t e r 16 domi nO Theory some say a girl was the First to Fall. With the flood of patrons streaming out the double front doors of The Station , there began an exodus that, allowed to continue, would have saved most in the club. Erin Pucino, the Derderians’ gas station clerk who had attended the concert on a free pass with her closest friend, Laurie Hussey, was part of this human tide. As long as people at the front of the pack exited the front doors as fast as those in the rear needed to move, the system remained in tenuous balance. But when burning plastic began to rain down, toxic smoke filled lungs, and screams of “We’re burning!” pierced the air, instinct drove the scrum forward against those in the entrance corridor—the narrow area with the downward-sloping tile floor. It was inevitable that someone in front would fall. As others behind that person tripped, they became additional obstacles. When a buzz-cut linebacker -size male threw himself over the top of the pile to escape, the die was cast. The narrow twenty-foot corridor to the front doors immediately filled with fallen club patrons, wedged diagonally like tipped dominoes, stacked floor to ceiling—and this occurred a mere ninety seconds after Great White’s pyro first ignited the club’s walls. The only members of that unfortunate human pyramid who stood a chance were those, like Erin Pucino, trapped just short of escape with their head or arms extending out the front door. She and others lay within the isosceles triangle of temperature and oxygen tenability identified by the NIST researchers immediately inside the front doors. But even that location was no guarantee of survival. In the seventeenth century, courts in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fifty miles to The Station’s north, sentenced convicted witches to “pressing” by stones until they could no longer expand their diaphragms to breathe. An equally cruel fate befell Station Fire victims at the bottom of the front-door pileup. One young woman within the stack, untouched by fire or smoke, was found on autopsy to have simply asphyxiated from the weight of those trapped above her. k i l l e r s h o w 104 From outside the front doors, the situation did not immediately look so bleak. Patrolman Mark Knott radioed in his “Stampede” call and picked himself up from the club’s frozen parking lot. He watched as perhaps one hundred patrons streamed out the same doors through which he had been propelled moments earlier. His colleague, Anthony Bettencourt, popped out with the surging crowd, his radio microphone still attached to his uniform shirt’s epaulet, but its cord ripped from the radio. For a few moments, Knott thought that evacuation of the club would be successful, if not particularly orderly. Then he heard screams, and desperate people kicking at the atrium windows from the inside. When the first victims fell in the front doorway, Knott knew things would not go well. Skott Greene, the genial proprietor of the Doors of Perception tattoo studio , and his buddy, Richard Cabral, were enjoying their status as personal guests of Jack Russell when Great White began its set. They both headed for the front doors as soon as it became clear that their free concert was over. Greene and Cabral soon found themselves in the immoveable crowd between the performance space and the club’s front doors. There they would spend the very brief remainder of their lives. Among those near the front doorway when the crowd tipped “like dominoes ” were John and Andrea Fairbairn. They were “an easy five steps from the door if they had been on their feet”—but they were not on their feet. John and Andrea were pinned to the floor, with John on top of his wife and another girl who lay motionless, spent from her struggle. Another man was yet below Andrea. The smoke was so thick that the only light came from the door opening. With the “sound of a freight train,” a flame front ignited flammable gases over their heads, raining burning roofing and ceiling tiles on them all, singeing their hair and backs. When a flaming piece of building material fell on the face of the girl underneath Fairbairn, he swiped at it twice, causing her to begin moving again. That slight movement freed his trapped leg, allowing him to wiggle one foot from...

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