Emotional videos show suffering, finger-pointing
OAKLAND >> Party promoter Jon Hrabko, his head covered by the hood of his camouflage jacket, sat next to Oakland Police Officer Josiah Ladd on a curb beside a Wendy’s drive-thru, watching firefighters spray water onto the smoldering Ghost Ship warehouse across the street.
“The whole place inside is all like old pianos and like wood,” Hrabko told the officer in police body camera footage obtained exclusively by this news agency. “The whole place is a f---ing tinderbox. On top of that, you sprinkle (in) some shoddy electrical, it was a recipe for f---ing disaster.
“It happened so quickly. I wish I had done a head count...” Hrabko continued, his voice rising and then trailing off.
“You did the best that you could. It’s nobody’s fault,” Ladd said.
“Well it is somebody’s fault and that’s why I’m pissed,” Hrabko
said.
That raw, candid conversation, captured the night of the horrific Dec. 2, 2016, fire that killed 36 people attending an electronic dance party, is included in hours of footage obtained from a source.
As their body cameras ran, police working the scene captured revealing moments when friends and family members arrived to seek word of missing loved ones, and then begin to realize the enormity of the tragedy. They also filmed interactions that help illuminate the still-debated question of just who was responsible for the demise of the Ghost Ship.
Who is to blame?
Hrabko’s words that night foreshadow the legal situation now, 16 months later: He is named — along with the city of Oakland, the Ng family that owns the building and two men identified as the master tenants in the arts collective — in a number of lawsuits filed by victims’ family members. Many of those attached to the tragedy are pointing fingers at others.
In Hrabko’s case, the footage suggests the party promoter was aware of the dangers inside the warehouse, and still made the fateful decision to hold the event there. In the days leading up to the fire, Hrabko had hyped the night on Facebook: “They can limit our invites but Not gonna let them limit our fun ... We shall rise up, overcome, and dance on the ruins. Stay safe out there.”
“He knew it was a tinderbox with bad electricity and yet he invited these people to the event and allowed the electrical equipment in for the DJs,” said Mary Alexander, an attorney for many of the victims’ families. “He knew it was putting a strain on the (electrical) system.”
Hrabko’s attorney, Orestes Cross, said it would be inappropriate to talk about possible evidence, but offered a statement on behalf of his client.
“Mr. Hrabko offers his deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones,” Cross said. “Some of these people were Mr. Hrabko’s
dearest friends and he is still wrought with grief that this tragic event occurred.”
The footage also includes the first public comments made by the reclusive Ng family, owners of the warehouse, who in a seven-minute conversation with a police officer stick to their current defense: The Ghost Ship warehouse was an artist collective and the landlords knew nothing of anyone living there.
“Is it an apartment? Warehouse?” Oakland police Officer Prince Manual Tenefrancia asked Chor Ng and her son, Kai Ng, as they stood about 50 feet from the still-burning warehouse in the early morning hours of Dec. 3, 2016.
“No one is supposed to be living there. It’s like an artist studio,” Kai Ng, the building’s property manager, explained to the officer as his mother stood next to him, wearing an American flag bandana over her face like a mask. “They say they spend nights there sometimes
because they’re working on projects, that’s what they tell me, and I say, ‘If you’re working that’s fine, but you can’t live there.’”
The only people charged criminally are master tenant Derick Almena, who spent the night of the fire elsewhere, and his righthand man Max Harris, who worked the door. Each faces 36 counts of involuntary manslaughter. In her first comments regarding her decision to not charge the Ngs or anyone else, District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said the lease for the building called for an artist studio and Almena and Harris were the ones who “misused” it.
“The owner had a level of separation from what was actually happening in the building,” O’Malley said. Almena and Harris “completely created the unsafe environment. We allege they blocked the exits with the speakers, for makeshift concerts. They had so much flammable material ... We could not pull the owner into that.
“Certainly (Kai Ng) has some civil liability,” she said.
O’Malley declined to answer questions about other Ghost Ship associates or elaborate further about decisions to charge or not.
Stories of loss, survival
Other footage from the body camera videos shows the initial frightful moments as police officers arrived at the warehouse and struggled to get an accurate count of the missing. Survivors shared tales of harrowing escapes. The interviews were almost all conducted in the Wendy’s parking lot across the street from the 31st Avenue warehouse, as a couple dozen survivors, friends, family and neighbors watched in stunned silence, draped in Red Cross blankets on the cold, crisp night.
Some told police their loved ones were still inside the burning building. Some cried, some hugged one another.
Ladd and other officers sought to console the
crowd.
“Just like you, I’m hoping for the best,” Officer Ladd told one. “They’re somewhere else or went home or something like that.”
In private, the officers went through their notepads tallying the missing names they had collected. Most of those names — clearly visible in footage of officers’ notepads — are of people known to have choked to death from the thick black smoke inside the building, never making it to the exit.
Aaron Marin, a Portland resident who was visiting the warehouse, told Oakland police Officer Gregory Palomo how the same problematic electrical system that may have sparked the warehouse fire helped save his life.
“I jumped from the top of the window. I was screaming. Everyone saw me. I was holding onto a weird power cord,” said Marin, wearing a black hoodie, referring to one of the many extension cords that snaked through the warehouse. “There was so much smoke dude, it melted and I just dropped and I landed and was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I made it.’”
Marin told officers smoke filled the upstairs and everyone ran to the front makeshift wooden staircase, but it became a bottleneck. He said he ran the other way and climbed over a “plastic thing” to escape out the window.
Prosecutors allege Harris blocked a second stairwell and escape route with a plastic, blow-up projection screen.
‘House or warehouse?’
One piece of video shows tenant Bob Mule telling of his unsuccessful attempt to save tenant Peter Wadsworth, who apparently broke his ankle in the initial panic. Mule showed the officer the back of his singed leather vest, and held up his burned hand, covered in gauze.
At one point the girlfriend of Barrett Clark arrived at the scene and gave police his information, her voice shaking.
“He was doing sound for the party,” Valentyn Edgewood told them, adding Clark was not answering his phone. Other survivors also shared how calls to the missing went immediately to voicemail or just kept ringing.
Chelsea Dolan’s mother arrived at the parking lot and told police her daughter, a DJ, was performing at the party.
Both Clark and Dolan perished in the fire.
Officers also spoke to Harris, who forlornly told police he heard someone scream “fire!” so he retrieved a fire extinguisher from his work space on the first floor. By then the flames were licking the ceiling, he said, and he was overwhelmed by fire and smoke.
At one point another officer, believed to be David Ha, spoke to officer Ladd about Ghost Ship.
“So is this a house or a warehouse?” the first officer asked.
“It’s both. People live there and it’s a warehouse,” Ladd said, reflecting how much some authorities knew about a space that was not permitted for tenants or parties. “They always have events here.”