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December 15, 2006

Hard drive full of Station fire evidence released / Photo

A frame grab from a video released today shows police examining soundproofing foam recovered from inside The Station nightclub. Pyrotechnics lit by the band ignited foam surrounding the stage.

PROVIDENCE -- The Attorney General's Office has released a computer hard drive with 185 CD-ROMs worth of electronic evidence gathered during its Station nightclub fire investigation.

The Providence Journal received the hard drive at about 11:30 a.m. and is reviewing the files.

A cover letter that accompanies the hard drive gives a description of the evidence, which includes 54 video files and 194 audio files of police and fire transmissions during the 2003 fire that killed 100 people.

The videos include recordings of live shows at the club, such as Red Hot from January 1999 and Lovin' Kry from April 2000. But they also include a press conference by club co-owner Jeffrey Derderian press conference from February 2003 and a broadcast report by Derderian, a former TV reporter, on fire safety.

Other video files are copies of television documentaries about the West Warwick tragedy and videos about soundproofing foam. Such foam surrounded the stage and has been blamed for accelerating the spread of the fire, which started when the band Great White lit its pyrotechnics.

Attorney General Patrick Lynch released today's evidence -- the second major release in recent weeks -- in response to public records requests by The Journal, The Associated Press and The Boston Globe. The evidence was gathered during a grand jury investigation but did not come out at trial because the three defendants entered pleas.

"Responding to this particular [open records] request has been, from all of our office's perspectives - planning and logistics, human resources and legal - challenging, to say the least," Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said in a statement. "I firmly believe, however, that our ongoing release of information is serving the public interest, and that we are meeting our challenge in a timely, responsible, and, above all, sensitive way."

More to come ...

-- projo.com staff writer Steve Peoples and Journal staff writer Paul Edward Parker

Posted by Steve Peoples  at 11:54 AM | Permalink

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