A decade after his son DaShand died in a stampede at the E2 nightclub, Howard Ray Sr. still finds himself with more questions than answers.
He wants to know how his youngest child ended up trapped in a stairwell that cold February night, why city officials hadn’t performed weekend inspections on the popular club and whether first responders could have done more to prevent the 21 deaths.
But, most of all, Ray asks why no one has been held responsible for the worst nightclub calamity in Chicago history.
That nagging question caused the 68-year-old businessman to retire a few years ago and transformed him into an armchair sleuth. With the help of his two surviving sons, he has educated himself on tort law, building codes and criminal negligence in the infinitesimal chance he will discover something that could provide those elusive answers.
“My son loved me. He trusted me,” Ray said. “I can’t stop until there’s real justice done. What kind of father would I be?”
With the 10th anniversary of the E2 tragedy, many of the victims’ relatives – including at least 36 children who lost a parent in the stampede – still find themselves mired in the past. More than a dozen lawsuits and criminal charges stemming from the tragedy remain unresolved, leaving families without compensation or the comfort of seeing someone held accountable for a preventable catastrophe.
Chaos at the Near South Side club erupted after fights broke out on the club’s second floor about 2:25 a.m. on Feb. 17, 2003, and escalated when security personnel used pepper spray to break up the brawls. The fumes from the spray set off a rush down the front stairwell to a ground-floor exit.
In the panic, 21 people were crushed to death or asphyxiated at the bottom of the stairs. Witnesses said the stack of bodies reached nearly 6 feet high.
Authorities determined there weren’t enough exits for the size of the crowd – estimated at more than 1,150 people. Expert witnesses testified that only 240 people should have been in the dance hall, but there was no record that the city issued an occupancy placard for the establishment.
The city continues to press a case against club co-owners Calvin Hollins Jr. and Dwain Kyles, even though they have twice been cleared of wrongdoing.
Hollins, along with his son Calvin Hollins III and party promoter Marco Flores, were acquitted in 2007 of involuntary manslaughter charges when a judge ruled that the city failed to prove the men had acted recklessly. Prosecutors dropped the charge against Kyles shortly after.
In a separate trial two years later, Calvin Hollins Jr. and Kyles were found guilty of disobeying a city housing court order – which predated the stampede – not to occupy the second floor of the building, where the nightclub was located. They each were sentenced to two years in prison.
An appellate court later overturned the verdict, saying the order was ambiguous. City prosecutors have appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.
Sheretta Patterson-Pennington, whose daughter Nicole Patterson, 22, died in the stampede, has stopped waiting for someone to be held accountable. Instead she focuses her energies on raising Nicole’s son, Angelo. Only 3 when his mother was trampled, he is now a teenager who plays four sports and does well in school, his grandmother says.
Angelo also has begun researching and following the case on his own on the Internet, often updating his grandparents on developments.
“For my own sanity and peace of mind, I’ve just had to move forward,” Patterson-Pennington said. “I’m depending on God at this point because depending on man has broken my heart.”
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Patterson-Pennington has a lawsuit pending, but years of legal wrangling have done little more than narrow the options for recourse.
The victims’ families were unsuccessful in their attempts to sue the city for what they contend was a botched rescue effort and failure to enforce building code violations. An appellate court ruled in 2008 that the city was immune from liability.
Hollins and Kyles settled with the families in 2006 for $1.5 million, the most that could be extracted from the nightclub’s insurance policies. An additional $1 million from a policy held by building owner Lesly Motors brought the total settlement to $2.5 million. When divided evenly, each of the families received $100,000, said Melvin Brooks, an attorney who represents the victims’ relatives. The remainder was used to pay small sums to people who were injured in the stampede, Brooks said.
Many families continue to sue Clear Channel Communications, the company that employed the disc jockey who worked the party at E2. Witnesses testified that it was the DJ who instructed a security guard to use pepper spray inside the club.
The media giant has settled with six families, for sums ranging from $375,000 to $1.25 million, but most, including the Ray family, are holding out for more, Brooks said.
“You have so many families who have hung in there for 10 years, and they feel like the magnitude of their losses has not been appreciated,” Brooks said.
A trial is expected this year for the Ray family’s claim, which will serve as a test case for other families, he said.
Clear Channel did not respond to requests for comment.
“The feeling by so many of the families is that the law isn’t always fair,” Brooks said.
For Howard Ray, fairness all but abandoned his family the moment he set eyes on his youngest son, 24-year-old DaShand, in the Cook County morgue. The Columbia College student, who was living with his parents in their Hillside home, had a large bruise near his right temple. Ray hopes the injury means his son was knocked unconscious before being smothered.
“I don’t know anything about the final moments of his life, and that maybe hurts the most,” Ray said. “Did he call out for help? How much pain was he in? These are the things that keep you up at night.”
They were the first of many questions that Ray confronted after his son’s death and ultimately sparked his quest for answers. He began collecting news reports and other documents related to the tragedy. He became an Internet detective, scouring the Web for code enforcement protocols and liability laws. He built a website dedicated to the victims, so friends and relatives could remember those lost and exchange information.
He enlisted his surviving sons, Howard Jr. and Ken, and began visiting City Hall, lawyers’ offices and Cook County courthouses in hopes of finding someone who would carry their mantle. They have done this consistently for 10 years, pleading with officials to investigate why no one checked to make sure the housing court order had been followed, why only one narrow stairwell was open to patrons and why a rear exit had been locked.
But they rarely get satisfying answers. More often than not, they’re told that beyond the existing civil cases against Clear Channel and contempt charges against the owners, there’s not much else that can be – or will be – done.
“We have a moral obligation to do this,” said Howard Ray Jr., 42. “It’s not just about my brother. We don’t want this to happen to anyone else. We are responsible for the next nightclub tragedy if we just sit silent and do nothing.”
Ken Ray, 38, bristles when people suggest the family should stop dwelling on his brother’s death and make peace with the past. The mere suggestion makes him think of his mother, Mary, who loved to sing along to an oldies radio station while she cooked for her boys or did chores around the house. He hasn’t heard her sing like that in nearly a decade.
“My mother used to be so happy. She was always smiling,” Ray said. “But my brother’s death changed her. She’s one of the reasons why we don’t just give up. This can’t be in vain.”
As he searches for answers, Howard Ray Sr. occasionally lets himself imagine what DaShand’s life would be like if he had escaped that night. His son would be 34 now, perhaps happily married and a regular guest at Sunday dinner. Maybe he would already have given his parents a couple of grandchildren, Ray says.
DaShand had been studying broadcast journalism in hopes of becoming a sportscaster. Because of his son’s deep voice and wide smile, his father believes it was an attainable dream. Ray occasionally pulls out old videos of DaShand doing mock sports reports as if to prove it.
“What would his life be like now?” Ray asks. “I think about it a lot, probably more than I should. But it’s one of those questions that we’ll never be able to answer.”