Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire (38 page)

Joe Kinan, the amateur bodybuilder and formal-wear salesman from Canton, Massachusetts, was among the most seriously injured Station fire victims
at Massachusetts General Hospital. Initially treated across the street at the Shriners Hospital, he was transferred to Mass. General once its burn unit, which had been full to capacity, could accommodate him. Kinan remained in critical condition longer than any other Station fire patient, grievously burned on his head, upper body, and hands. His ears, one eye, his nose, and lips were gone, burned off in the inferno. Doctors eventually grafted skin over where his eye had been, believing there was no point in even attempting prosthesis. His sight in the remaining eye was only partial. Doctors had to amputate most of his fingers, leaving him with opposable pincer stubs on one hand only. Amazingly, once Kinan emerged from months in a medically induced coma, he embraced life with a positive attitude that stunned his caregivers, offering encouragement to other patients in the burn ward. Several recalled passing Kinan on a gurney in the hospital and thinking, “My God, Joe’s so much worse off than me, and yet he’s asking
me
how I’m doing!”

Sometimes, when in the presence of angels, one can only marvel.

During the two and a half months that Pam Gruttadauria was at Massachusetts General Hospital, her parents visited her every day. They would speak to her, hopeful that she could hear their voices through her deep sedation. Sometimes they thought that she reacted to spoken words. Anna and Joe Gruttadauria clung to that belief in the face of Pam’s devastating injuries. Their daughter had no hands. Or eyelids. Or nose. The burns to 100 percent of her face had destroyed not just the skin, but also the underlying muscles that provide shape and expression. Would she want to live that way? Her parents could not help but wonder.

But Joe and Anna also believed that God had saved Pam for a reason. They had to believe it, in order to make some sense of her suffering. Even if Pam survived, though, she would face years of painful treatments and lifetime disability. The Gruttadaurias knew it was in God’s hands. As it had always been.

In late April, some ten weeks after the fire, Pam’s condition began to decline. Infection was overwhelming her organs. Her blood pressure could not be maintained. Pam’s kidneys and liver were failing. “I think Pam’s tired,” Joe Gruttadauria told his wife. “She’s fought a good battle, but she’s tired.” When Pam’s doctors told the Gruttadaurias that nothing more could be done for their daughter, Joe and Anna agreed to discontinue her respirator and kidney machine. They were comforted by the doctors’ assurances that Pam would feel no pain.

Anna and Joe remained at their daughter’s bedside while she continued
to breathe shallowly, disconnected from the respirator. After about three hours, Pam peacefully yielded up her spirit. That night, Pam Gruttadauria, age thirty-three, became the Station fire’s hundredth, and final, fatality.

It would be years before many of the most seriously burned Station fire victims could concern themselves with the third priority of burn care, cosmetic appearance. For them, surgeries to release function-impairing scar contractures would long take precedence over aesthetics.

For others who may have a played a role in the Station tragedy, however, priorities were not so constrained.

On May 24, 2006, Jack Russell appeared on an episode of
TV
’s entertainment tabloid
Extra
. The “news hook” for the story was Russell’s showing off the results of his recent face-lift:

Voiceover: “He’s the lead singer for the ’80s metal band Great White, but for Jack Russell, the past three years have not been great. His life unraveled when a Rhode Island nightclub caught fire during a concert and . . . one hundred lives were lost. . . .

Russell: “My drinking really, really started getting really bad after that.”

Voiceover: “The forty-five-year-old checked into rehab. Now, he’s nine months clean and sober and ready for a fresh start.”

Russell: “I’m feeling so good inside. I look in the mirror and it just doesn’t represent how I feel inside, so I, you know, I thought it was time for a change.”

Voiceover: “That change? A face-lift.”

[Graphic: “$30,000–$45,000”] . . .

Voiceover: “Four weeks later, check out the results! Before and after. Jack got the subtle, not-overdone look he wanted. His eyes, more refreshed. Jowls gone, and no more turkey neck!”

Russell: “Most of my friends go, ‘Have you lost weight?’ and I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, about ten pounds in the face,’ you know?” [laughs]

Three thousand miles to the east, Joe Kinan began his day. It was difficult for him to line up his new prosthetic ears with the magnets that had been implanted under his grafted skin to hold them in place. But he managed.

After all, as the ex-formal-wear salesman’s girlfriend observed, “This just happens to be the suit he is wearing right now.”

CHAPTER 25

RISKY BUSINESS

IN MOST STATES, THE PLAINTIFFS
’
TRIAL BAR
is home to a handful of respected practitioners with extensive trial experience, rigorous analytical skills, and absolutely titanic egos. Rhode Island is no exception. As often as not, these individuals have practiced together in the past and, after going their separate ways, spend the rest of their professional lives trying to prove that they are far and away superior to their former colleagues. Some do this by campaigning for every available office within the organized bar; others, by seeking as much publicity for their cases as possible; and others, by earning a reputation as the meanest dog on the block. Rhode Island has all three types (plus a few hybrids). And it was inevitable that they would be drawn like moths to the Station fire’s flames.

The victims of the Station fire were, for the most part, blue-collar, biker-bar types; many were only marginally employed, and many were single parents. Substantial savings, or even first-rate health insurance, was the exception, rather than the norm, for this group. Loss or incapacity of a breadwinner meant devastation for many a Station victim’s household.

Whatever may have been their station before The Station, however, all injured persons had in common that they were blameless victims of negligence and greed on the part of multiple perpetrators. The fire victims were dearly in need, and deserving of compensation, and the civil justice system was their only chance for recompense. The response of Rhode Island’s plaintiffs’ bar to this pressing need displayed both the best and worst of their profession.

In the United States (in contrast to the other countries whose legal systems derive, like ours, from English jurisprudence), attorneys are allowed to represent plaintiffs on a “contingent fee” basis — in other words, they are not paid by the hour, but as a percentage (in most cases, a third) of what they recover for their clients. If they lose, they are paid nothing for their years of work. Riskier still, contingent-fee attorneys customarily advance all expenses of the litigation, which, in a case like the Station fire, can run into the millions.

Originally disfavored by courts and legal ethicists, contingent fees are now legal and ethical in all states, because they provide a “key to the courthouse”
for persons who could never afford to pay hourly attorneys’ fees. A logical outgrowth of American entrepreneurial spirit and disdain for elitism, the “American Rule” not only allows contingent fee litigation, but eschews feeshifting to the losing party (in the
UK
and other Commonwealth countries, the losing party in civil litigation must pay the
other
side’s attorney’s fees, in addition to his own — a risk that simply cannot be borne by many private individuals). The result in the United States is that grievously injured persons, who could hardly afford hourly attorneys’ fees, much less their adversaries’ legal fees, can have their day in court if they find an attorney willing to champion their cause.

For generations, American plaintiffs’ attorneys stayed afloat on a mix of difficult cases and straightforward personal injury actions — auto accidents, slip-and-falls, and the like. Reputations were earned, and new cases garnered, the hard way, through trial results over many years. Lawyers’ advertising was strictly limited by state ethical rules. Then, in 1977, the competitive landscape changed forever. The United States Supreme Court, in
Bates v. State Bar of Arizona
, invalidated state restrictions on lawyers’ advertising, declaring that such ads were protected commercial speech within the ambit of the First Amendment. And we have all been the poorer since.

The Supreme Court, in its 5–4
Bates
decision, considered, but dismissed, arguments that unfettered attorney advertising would tarnish the profession or be inherently misleading (to the extent that ads suggest superior results if one hires a particular advertiser). If only the high court could have seen today’s ads, perhaps its majority would have sided with dissenting justices Powell and Stewart, who predicted that the decision would threaten the character of what had been a “learned profession.” What no one could have predicted, however, is how attorney advertising would, by its debasement of the profession, taint jury pools against plaintiffs and fuel the insurance industry’s legislative efforts to limit victims’ access to the courts. The irony of lawyer advertising is that, while insurers may publicly cluck over it, they well know (and adore) that, because many jurors view such ads with disdain, it lessens the likelihood, and amount, of plaintiffs’ verdicts in all cases — a boon for defendants.

Insomniacs and stay-at-homes can now kick back in front of their
TVS
at any hour of the day or night and see actors portraying insurance adjusters becoming apoplectic upon learning that the firm of Fisher, Cuttbaite & Troll is “on the case.” One punch of the remote, and viewers can watch crash-test dummies endorsing another personal injury attorney. Yet a third channel features a lawyer posing in front of a cheesy baseball park background. “Hire
the Heavy Hitter,” he urges, with no apparent embarrassment. At the other end of the dial, the actor who portrayed super-agent Napoleon Solo in
TV
’
S
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. sternly instructs viewers to “tell the insurance company
YOU
. . .
MEAN
. . .
BUSINESS
.”