Dominican Night Club collapse: Survivor recalls “General Chaos”

At 01:00 on Tuesday morning, Carvin Javier Molleia danced with his mother at a Santo Domingo nightclub when he noticed something falling from the ceiling.

At that time he didn’t think much about it. “No one thought that as a small stone fell, the whole roof would collapse,” he says.

The percussionist, who moved to the Dominican Republic eight years earlier, was out with his mother Carmen and friends to see a concert by Merengue singer Ruby Perez.

It was the first time when the 32 -year -old Carvin and his mother had seen each other in three years and was intended to be a night of joy and a holiday.

But in the early hours of Tuesday morning disasters.

“What I have in my head is the screams, the loud sound of the ceiling that falls, my mom’s screams ask me if I’m fine, I ask her if she’s okay,” Carvin recalls.

“Everything happened so fast. I guess I closed my eyes and my instinct was to hug my mother.”

Both Carvin and his mother, who stood near the stage, were hit on the head of pieces of falling ceiling, but they were lucky to avoid serious injuries. Ruby Perez was among the killed.

In the chaos that quickly unfolded, Carvin managed to find the door through which he and his mother fled out.

But his friend Jessica and her sister were still in the club. Desperate to find them, he decided to return inside.

Inside, Carvin desperately called for Jessica’s name, but no one answered.

He says he felt powerless to help those who were trapped under the debris.

“The stones were huge. I felt useless.”

Carvin says he then repeatedly left the building where he will try to call paramedics, and then return inside to call his friend’s name and call her on the phone.

“Then the calls stopped passing.”

Carvin describes the consequences of the collapse as “total chaos”.

“People went crazy,” he says.

“They were pulling wounded people. I saw when they removed the saxophonist who died.”

Minutes after the collapse, emergency services arrived as the ambulances and the carriers “continued to come”.

Carvin says he stayed at the scene for about an hour and a half after the collapse.

At that time, he said he had not seen any machines arrive to remove the debris.

He says he wanted to continue trying to find his friend, but had to take his mother home, who was painful.

“I had to pick her up and reassure her.”

Later on the same day, Jessica and the lifeless bodies of her sister were found among the ruins. At least 221 people were killed in the disaster.

Carvin says he regrets that he has failed to do more for his friend.

“It was terrible that I couldn’t help her. I called her name, but she didn’t answer. She feels terribly unable to do anything.”

Considering Isabel Caro and Alicia Hernandez.