One security camera lingered on the man in the white shirt, so compressed by the throbbing bodies around him that he couldn’t lower the useless arms he waved above his head. Elsewhere, a woman’s head slumped as if her neck had snapped. Another woman among the desperate people trying to flee danger bobbed like an apple in a tub, suspended at times above shoulders, backs and chests in flagrant defiance of gravity.
That terrifying video surfaced in 2003 after the Presidents Day calamity that snuffed out 21 lives in a stairwell at Chicago’s E2 nightclub. But the images of the man and the two women actually originated on the building’s second floor; none of the club’s four cameras peered down the stairwell itself. The rest of us, appalled by the news as we awoke on a holiday morn, knew that 21 people were crushed or asphyxiated in slow deaths more violent, more anguished, than most of ours will be. But what, exactly, happened out of sight in that narrow sluice has long been the stuff of macabre surmise.
Until now. Detailed testimony at the trial of three men accused of involuntary manslaughter is tugging more of us into E2’s hellish stairwell. We’ll let the courts decide who, if anyone, should pay criminal consequences for what happened there. But the early accounts–thus far only from witnesses for the prosecution–have filled in some of this saga’s horrifying gaps.
If most of us take one resolution from this trial, let it be our demand for aggressive enforcement of the mundane safety provisions that most of take for granted in this vertical city. There’s little intriguing about building codes, liquor control rules, security deployment and city rescue plans for moments when all else fails. Except that these dry protocols, when enforced, can determine whether we finish each day safe or sorry.
On Wednesday, testimony from security guard Brad Hughes drew gasps from the victims’ families as they heard his story of how their loved ones died. Many in the courtroom hadn’t heard that people were climbing the 30 stairs to the club floor even as partyers fleeing a fight and a haze of Mace-like spray flew down those stairs. “I seen the doors blow open, the people got thrown through the air on top of the people coming up the stairs,” Hughes said. “The crowd keep pushing and pushing, and somebody stumbled. When they stumbled, that’s when the pile got bigger.”
As people fell face down on the hard stairs, according to Hughes and other witnesses, more patrons climbed or collapsed atop them. On Thursday, security guard Ira Navarro said several fights had broken out at a club that prosecutors say was capable of handling 240 patrons but instead held more than 1,100. Navarro said he helped a pregnant woman descend a rear stairwell to the first floor of the building, then carried her to the front and learned of the stampede. “I saw all the people piled higher than I am,” Navarro said, “and I’m 6 foot.”
Navarro testified that he led rescue workers up another stairwell to the second floor–only to find the frightened mob of people still trying to push their way down the main stairwell that was plugged with bodies of the victims.
There’s no reason to think each of us wouldn’t be just as frantic to escape as the patrons in that mob. The history of human disasters is replete with stories of people killed not by a lethal catalyst–flood, fire, whatever–but as a result solely of their instinctive urge to flee.
It’s because we humans know our innate and reckless tendencies–that we won’t, for example, always walk from trouble single file–that we put so many safety restrictions on buildings in general, and public gathering places in particular. Did the owners of E2, the floor manager and the promoter of the party behave recklessly, as prosecutors say, and cost innocents their lives?
The answer to that is crucial to understanding E2, less relevant to the next tragedy we have the power, now, to prevent. We can do that by enforcing our safety codes with a vengeance. The 288 Chicago firefighters, police officers and paramedics who raced to the E2 saved many, many lives. But they couldn’t begin to undo decisions that left 21 young people lifeless in a stairwell.
