3 Years After Club Fire, a Father’s Grief Echoes

Good morning, good morning, good morning, good morning: That’s radio talk-show host Dave Kane, exuberantly greeting up to 10,000 listeners each weekday on WNRI-AM.

Kane -- burly, bearded and wearing a blue shirt festooned with white pineapples -- rattles off salutations to police and fire personnel, civil servants, and healthcare professionals. Then, more softly, he offers a special greeting to “good old 41.”

His fans recognize the number that was of mystical significance to Kane’s son Nicky, the youngest victim of the 2003 Station nightclub fire. So familiar is the number that listeners call in to say, “Hey, Dave, I had a ‘41’ today,” meaning they believe that Nicky’s spirit somehow crossed their paths.

The nation’s fourth-deadliest nightclub blaze took less than five minutes to level a small wooden roadhouse in West Warwick. The conflagration broke out during a pyrotechnic display that opened a concert by the heavy metal band Great White, claiming 100 lives. More than twice that number were injured -- many of them seriously. Nicky O’Neill, who used his mother’s last name, was 18 when he died.

But another toll has lingered, in the lasting anguish that continues to blanket a close-knit state. Rhode Island has just more than 1 million residents. Almost everyone, it seemed, knew someone -- or knew someone who knew someone -- who attended the fatal concert.

“You can’t throw a rock in Rhode Island without hitting someone who was affected by the fire,” said Kane, 58, who has made the fire a recurring theme on his show.

Earlier this year, Great White manager Daniel M. Biechele received a 15-year sentence, with four years to serve and 11 suspended, after pleading guilty to setting off the pyrotechnics that caused the fire. The courtroom was packed with families of dead or injured victims, brimming with rage and sorrow. Many read statements about how the event had altered their lives -- among them, Dave Kane.

A similar turnout is expected in September when Station club co-owner Michael Derderian faces involuntary manslaughter charges in the first criminal trial since the fire.

But this time, Kane is not certain whether he will attend. “I’m not sure what the point is,” he said.

Instead, the 35-year veteran of the local airwaves uses “Kane & Company” to hammer away at what he sees as bureaucratic incompetence. From the tiny studio in a brown-shingled shack of a radio station, his primary target is state Atty. Gen. Patrick C. Lynch. Kane contends that Lynch failed to bring charges against fire marshals and other officials who might have prevented the tragedy. Lynch has responded by calling Kane “a sad, pathetic figure” -- a quote Kane is fond of airing.

The show has no fixed content. Recently, for example, Kane spent two hours talking with his callers about S&H; Green Stamps. But week after week, he talks about the Station club case.

Often, he makes reference to the book he wrote about his son’s life and death, “41 Signs of Hope.” Kane emphasizes that the book is less about the fire than the young musician who also acted in local repertory theater.

On one recent show, Kane played one of his son’s songs as a lead-in to a discussion of the upcoming criminal proceedings.

After Derderian is tried, his brother and business partner Jeffrey Derderian also will face a jury.

As Kane noted to his listeners, Rhode Island is so small that before the fire, Jeffrey Derderian was a friend. “Jeff Derderian’s wife had my ex-wife for a fourth-grade teacher,” Kane said on the air from Woonsocket, a city of 43,000 people about 15 minutes from Providence.

“Do you think we can find 16 jurors anywhere in this state who don’t have an opinion or a stake in this case?” Kane asked his audience.

A cheery voice that Kane recognized as a regular caller’s was promptly on the phone. Kane never asks for names, hometowns or other identifying traits.

“Probably not,” the woman said, answering Kane’s query about the challenge of finding an untainted jury pool. “Anybody that doesn’t know the story, I can’t imagine. Me, I’d love to be on that jury.”

Another caller, this time with a deep male voice:

“I hope you never stop talking about the Station club fire, and you never let us forget. I will never get tired of hearing about it, or talking about it. And if people stay silent about this, it won’t get fixed.”

Over the years, Kane has taken on causes like AIDS, domestic violence, mental illness and issues pertaining to physical disabilities. Once, he persuaded a local newspaper to run a birth notice for a stillborn child -- after the paper had already printed an obituary for the baby. The mother, Kane recalled, was thrilled because she wanted public acknowledgment that her child had lived, not just died.

In this instance, he said he feared he was easily discounted as a grieving father. “I felt more powerful doing things like this when I didn’t have a dog in the fight,” he told the caller. “When I was doing things for other people.”

The voice on the line reassured him. “You speak from the heart,” the caller said. “And if that doesn’t touch people, I don’t know what will.”

Ann Marie D’Alessio, executive director of the Rhode Island Victims’ Advocacy and Support Center, said she was not surprised the nightclub disaster remained so close to the surface.

“What happened that night, no matter how people consider it, is a homicide,” said D’Alessio, who was on the fire scene while the ashes of the nightclub were still smoldering. “That is a life-altering, permanent experience. It is a lifelong roller coaster. People learn to cope with it, and manage it. But there is no getting over it.”

Over a lobster roll sandwich after the show, Kane said that the time he devoted to the fire was not just because of Nicky. He said he was troubled because the justice system had moved slowly, and because victims and families had not been kept informed the way many would have liked.

Kane said he also was upset that officials were proposing fire laws inspired by the blaze.

“We don’t need new laws,” he said. “We need for the old ones to be enforced.”

He does not want his state to wallow in the tragedy, he said. But he also wants no one to forget.

“I have no choice,” he said. “I have no choice but to take a stand, and to fight. This is serious stuff.”