‘He Was Just Like Any Other Kid’

DaShand Ray was going to college, working nights at FedEx, and on his way to becoming a famous sportscaster, he was certain, or maybe a sports agent.

Damien Riley had a joke for every occasion, usually two, and was crazy about his 4-year-old daughter.

David Jones was a bit shy, and he had never been to a nightclub when he headed to the E2 on Sunday night, encouraged by a friend to lighten up, have some fun celebrating his 21st birthday.

All are dead now, their names listed along with 18 others on a sheet at the Cook County coroner’s office that reveals only the most basic details of the lives lost Monday morning in a stampede out of the club.

As the city and the club owners continued arguing Thursday over who is to blame, the coroner released the last of the bodies. The funerals are scheduled to begin today.

And before the dead are buried or cremated, before the disaster becomes more about lawsuits than about those lost, the families wanted to remind others that their loved ones should be remembered as people, not statistics from the “Nightclub Stampede.”

Ray, 24, had gone high school with a son of one of the club’s owners and was a regular at E2, a well-dressed young man with a sliver of a mustache who had no problem getting women to dance with him.

He was a packager at FedEx, and he was getting close to earning an associate’s degree in broadcasting, which, he hoped, would mean he could spend his days doing what he really loved.

“He loved to watch sports, any sport, basketball, football,” said Ken Ray, DaShand’s older brother. And when he wasn’t watching sports, DaShand was battling his brother on the video playing field of his PlayStation2.

“Down to earth, likable, always had a real big smile,” Ray recalled. “He dated. He was young. He was just like any other kid.”

Ray paused in the middle of his description and said: “I love him.”

Riley wore an almost constant smile that was so big it somehow made his small frame seem much larger. The 24-year-old had dropped out of Marshall High School on the city’s West Side but never stopped taking classes, vowing one day to earn his general equivalency diploma.

He ran a cleaning crew for his grandmother’s janitorial company, at one point hiring friend Michael Wilson. The two died next to each other in the stairwell of the club, said Riley’s mother, Linda Hooker.

Riley loved to play basketball, but not as much as he loved playing with his 4-year-old daughter, Asia.

“She asks her grandmama, ‘Who’s going to take care of me?’ ” said Riley’s grandfather, Milton White. “She’s only 4, but she knows what happened.

“He loved blue jeans and T-shirts and having fun. He always had a smile. He was a very good kid. We will miss him, I know that much.” White excused himself. He had to go to the funeral home to make arrangements.

The families have found themselves trying to arrange funerals and grieve in a surreal aftermath of one of the deadliest such accidents in modern U.S. history.

In addition to the 21 killed, dozens more were injured after security guards allegedly discharged pepper spray in the second-floor club to break up a fight, prompting club-goers to try to flee down a single narrow stairwell.

In the hours after the disaster, relatives of Nicole Patterson went from hospital to hospital searching for the 22-year-old. They finally found her -- at the morgue. By the time they returned home, attorneys already had left messages on their answering machine asking whether they needed a lawyer.

Families say at least one law firm has offered to pay funeral expenses if they hire its attorneys to represent them. One law firm ran an ad in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times saying: “Were you injured at the E2 and Epitome Club Stampede??!! Call for a No-cost consultation NOW!”

R&B; singer R. Kelly offered each family $3,000 to help with funeral costs.