Security guards blocked the exit of a South Side nightclub early Monday in a failed attempt to control a crowd panicked by pepper spray, witnesses said, creating a crushing, smothering pile-up near the door that killed 21 people.
The deadliest disaster in Chicago in more than two decades unfolded at the packed E2 club on South Michigan Avenue when two women began fighting around 2 a.m., and security guards sought to break up the scuffle with pepper spray.
The burning mist prompted a stampede toward the club’s steep and narrow staircase, and witnesses said other security guards then blocked the door to the street, a claim police officials said they were investigating but could not confirm Monday.
“They blocked the door for three or four minutes. We tried to turn around, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t move at all,” said Kristy Mitchell, 22, of Gary. “I was underneath 15 people. No one could help us. I told the other ladies, ‘Stop screaming, you’re wasting our air.’
“It was like the Titanic in a nightclub,” she said.
Survivors and others described victims, including the more than 50 injured, being trampled as hundreds of patrons trapped on the club’s second floor struggled to get out. Victims, with crushed faces and broken legs, pleaded for water, air and ice.
Carlisa Howard, 26, said she could hear the victims pounding on the door to get out as she stood on the sidewalk outside the club.
Fearing just such a stampede, Howard had raced for the door and made it out after the spraying began. Once on the street, she turned around and saw a security guard block and apparently bolt the door, she said.
Twenty-one people were confirmed dead Monday afternoon at eight hospitals and the Cook County medical examiner’s office. It was the largest loss of life in a single incident in Chicago since the 1979 crash of Flight 191, which killed 273 people.
Some family members went to the headquarters of Rainbow/PUSH, where Revs. Jesse Jackson and James Meeks led a noon prayer service. Jackson suggested the club’s owners deserved sympathy as well.
“The owners are victims. And, of course, the dead are victims,” Jackson said.
But Dorothy Myers, mother of 22-year-old victim Antonio Myers, walked down an aisle at the service, crying and shouting out: “We need answers. What’s going on? Our kid’s gone. Oh Jesus, give us some answers.”
