Dominican Night Club collapse: Survivor recalls “common chaos”

At 1:00 on Tuesday morning, Karvin Javier Maleya danced with his mother in Santom -Doming’s nighttime set when he noticed that something was falling out of the ceiling.

At the time he didn’t think about it. “Nobody thought that since a small stone fell all the roof, it was strayed,” he says.

The percussionist, who moved to the Dominican Republic eight years earlier, was with his mother, Carmen and friends to see the concert of singer Merengue Rubby Pérez.

It was the first time Karvin, 32, and his mother saw three years later, and it had to become nights of joy and celebration.

But in the first hours on Tuesday, a disaster took place.

“What I have in my head is the screaming, the loud sound of the ceiling that gets, the shouts of my mom ask me, or well, I ask her, or well with her,” Karvin recalls.

“It all happened so fast. I suppose I closed my eyes and my instinct was hugging my mom.”

Both Karvin, and his mother standing near the stage, hit the fallen ceiling on the head, but were lucky to avoid serious injuries. Ruby Perez was among the killed.

In the chaos, which quickly unfolded, Karvin managed to find the door through which he and his mother escaped outside.

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

Inside the Karvin club, the name of Jessica shouted desperately, but no one answered.

He says he felt powerless to help those trapped under the garbage.

“The stones were huge. I felt useless.”

Karvin says he then went out of the building where he tried to call a paramedic and then return inside to scream his friend’s name and call her on the phone.

“After that, the calls stopped worrying.”

Karvin describes the consequences of collapse as “common chaos”.

“People are crazy,” he says.

“They pulled the wounded people. I saw when they pulled out a saxophonist who died.”

In a matter of minutes, a quick service came when ambulances and stretchers “continued to go”.

Karvin says he stayed at the scene about one and a half hours after the collapse.

At this time, he says he didn’t see any machine coming to remove the trash.

He says he wanted to continue to try to find his friend, but he needed to take home his mother who ached.

“I needed to get to her home and calm her.”

Later on this day, Jessica and inanimate bodies were found among the rubble. At least 221 people were killed in the disaster.

Karvin says he regretted that he couldn’t do more for his friend.

“It was awful, not having the opportunity to help her. I shouted at her name, but she didn’t answer. It feels horribly unable to do anything.”

With reports Isabel Kara and Alicia Hernandez.