Families of Stampede Victims Focus on Remembering

CHICAGO–DaShand Ray was going to college, working nights at Federal Express, and on his way to becoming a famous sportscaster, he was certain, or maybe a sports agent.
Damien Riley had a joke for every occasion, usually two, and was crazy about his 4-year-old daughter.
David Jones was a bit shy, and had never been to a nightclub when he headed to the E2 club Sunday night, encouraged by a friend to lighten up, have some fun celebrating his 21st birthday.
All are dead now, their names listed along with 18 others on a sheet at the Cook County Coroner’s office that reveals only the most basic details of the lives lost Monday morning in a stampede out of the club.
As the city and the club owners continued arguing over who is to blame Thursday, the coroner released the last of the bodies. The funerals are set to begin Friday. And before the dead are buried or cremated, before the disaster becomes more about lawsuits than about those lost, the families wanted to remind others that their loved ones should be remembered as people, not statistics from the ”Nightclub Stampede.”
Ray, 24, went to high school with a son of one of the club’s owners and was a regular at E2, a well-dressed young man with a sliver of a mustache who had no problem getting women to dance with him. He was a packager at FedEx, and was getting close to earning his associate’s degree in broadcasting, which, he hoped, would mean he could spend his days doing what he really loved.
”He loved to watch sports, any sport, basketball, football,” said Ken Ray, DaShand’s older brother. And when he wasn’t watching sports, DaShand was battling his brother on the video playing field of his PlayStation2.
”Down to earth, likable, always had a real big smile,” Ray recalled. ”He dated. He was young. He was just like any other kid.”
Then Ray paused in the middle of his description and said: ”I love him.”
Damien Riley wore an almost constant smile that was so big it somehow made his thin, small frame seem much larger. The 24-year-old had dropped out of Marshall High School on the city’s West Side but never stopped taking classes, vowing one day to earn his General Equivalency Diploma.
He ran a cleaning crew for his grandmother’s janitorial company, at one point hiring friend Michael Wilson. The two died next to each other in the stairwell of the club, his mother, Linda Hooker, said.
Riley loved to play basketball, but not as much as he loved playing with his 4-year-old daughter, Asia.
”She asks her grandmamma, ‘Who’s going to take care of me?”’ said Riley’s grandfather Milton White. ”She’s only four, but she knows what happened.
”He loved blue jeans and T-shirts and having fun,” White said. ”He always had a smile. He was a very good kid. We will miss him, I know that much.”
White excused himself. He had to go to the funeral home to make arrangements.
The families have found themselves trying to arrange funerals and grieve in a surreal aftermath of one of the deadliest such accidents in modern U.S. history.
In addition to the 21 killed, dozens more were injured after security guards allegedly discharged pepper spray in the second-floor club to break up a fight, prompting club-goers to try to flee down a single, narrow stairwell.
Family members of Nicole Patterson went from hospital to hospital searching for the 22-year-old in the hours after the disaster. They finally found her–at the morgue. By the time they returned home, attorneys had already left messages on their phone asking if they needed a lawyer.
Families say at least one law firm has offered to pay funeral expenses if they hire its attorneys to represent them. One law firm ran an ad in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times saying: ”Were you injured at the E2 and Epitome Club Stampede??!! Call for a No-cost consultation NOW!”
Mary Ray, DaShand’s mother, tried to focus Thursday not on the number of lawsuits filed or the latest allegations by the city against the owners or guards, but on her son, who is to be buried over the weekend.
She took comfort, she said, that her son had lived his life well.
”He was studying communications, he had many female acquaintances, he graduated from Proviso West (high school),” Mary Ray said. ”A lot of people knew him.”