Report: Station Workers' Families Seek Benefits
March 3, 2005Lynn Arditi of The Providence Journal is reporting that lawyers representing the families of four Station nightclub employees killed in the fire of Feb. 20, 2003, will ask a state Workers' Compensation Court judge today to order the nightclub's owners, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, to pay death benefits and lost wages.
The state workers' compensation law entitles the family of someone who dies on the job to receive $15,000 in death benefits, plus a portion of the deceased person's lost wages. Dependent children are entitled to benefits until age 18 or, if they are in college, age 23.
The nightclub workers who died in the blaze were Tracy F. King, 39, Dina Ann DeMaio, 30, Steven R. Mancini, 39, and his wife, Andrea Louise Jacavone Mancini, 28.
The petitions for workers' compensation benefits are scheduled to be heard today by Judge Bruce Q. Morin.
The fire at the roadside nightclub in West Warwick began when a tour manager for the rock band GREAT WHITE set off a pyrotechnics display that ignited packing foam used as soundproofing on the walls and the ceiling. The fire killed 100 people and injured more than 200, some of them critically.
About two weeks after the fire, state labor officials discovered that the Derderians had never purchased the required workers' compensation coverage. As a result, families of the four nightclub workers who died have so far have received no workers' compensation benefits.
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