It was 2:23 p.m. on a Monday in Santo Domingo, 379 tickets had already been sold for a big show that night at the Jet Set disco, and the club’s reservations manager, Gregorio Adames, was getting worried: Chunks of the roof were falling, knocking down ceiling panels.
Panels had come loose before, but he suddenly realized that the damage was more dangerous than anyone thought. The trouble wasn’t the panels: It was the roof itself.
“Sir, there’s an important issue that needs to be reviewed at the disco,” he wrote in a WhatsApp message to his boss, Antonio Espaillat, the club’s owner and a radio station mogul, according to a 126-page criminal indictment released this weekend.
When another chunk came down at 11:40 p.m., bruising a customer, Mr. Adames urged his boss to cancel the show, prosecutors said. But Mr. Espaillat was out of town, and his sister, Maribel Espaillat, who also managed the club, said she wasn’t authorized to make big decisions without him.
At 12:44 a.m. on the morning of April 8, the decades-old roof of the building, Santo Domingo’s most popular nightclub, came crashing down, ultimately killing 235 people and injuring nearly 200 more. The victims came from nine countries; five were from the United States. One hundred and thirty children lost parents, with 15 losing both parents. The dead ranged in age from 17 to 71.
The Espaillats face involuntary homicide charges and have been jailed pending a bond hearing this week. Prosecutors are asking for Mr. Espaillat to be held without bail and for his sister to be under house arrest.
The siblings had known for years that serious problems existed with the roof, prosecutors said, but instead of paying professionals to repair it, they hired unqualified laborers to do repeated slapdash temporary fixes. They added layers and layers of concrete — more than a foot thick — onto an already overloaded roof. Years of neglect are documented on social media posts by customers and by complaints from employees, prosecutors said.
Seventeen heavy structures, including water tanks, air-conditioning condensers and aluminum sheds, were on the club’s roof and contributed to the collapse, according to an engineering report commissioned by prosecutors and obtained by The New York Times.
Whenever the roof leaked, owners put tarps on the roof to catch the water or added more layers of concrete, increasing the weight that eventually led to the collapse, prosecutors said. Renovations in 2010 and 2015 were done without permits, and a necessary support column had been removed, the indictment said.
If convicted, the Espaillats could face three months to two years in prison and a small fine. “Even the fine is less than $2 — it’s insignificant,” said Remberto José Durán, the man who was hit with a piece of the ceiling about an hour before the roof collapsed. “They were warned.”
Mr. Durán was trapped for seven hours under rubble and his wife, Indira Disla Méndez, 39, died instantly.
The indictment stunned survivors like him, who are only now learning the extent of the warnings prosecutors say the Jet Set owners were given of the roof’s deterioration. They see the charges as a slap on the wrist for wealthy business owners who cut corners that cost hundreds of lives.
Even prosecutors acknowledged that the country’s “outdated legal framework” meant that the collapse, the Dominican Republic’s biggest mass tragedy, was unlikely to result in significant prison time.
“Let justice be done,” said Crismarlyn Encarnación, 18, who was in the club at the time of the disaster and went to a court hearing on the case this weekend on crutches and with an orthopedic collar around her neck. “Let him pay, because he knew what could happen.”
Félix Portes, a lawyer for dozens of victims, went further.
“The defendants don’t need a lawyer,” he said, “because they already have the attorney general’s office.”
Serafín de Jesús, who lost a daughter, María de Jesús Martínez, in the collapse, was disappointed.
“There’s evidence that they’re guilty,” Mr. de Jesús said.
But the country’s attorney general, Yeni Berenice Reynoso, said involuntary homicide was the most serious crime her office could file.
“We have an outdated legal framework with unreasonable penalties that, in many cases, are not even minimally proportional to the harm caused,” Ms. Reynoso said in a statement.
The penal code lacks a proper charge for crimes of such negligence, she said.
Miguel Valerio, the Espaillats’ lawyer, said involuntary homicide was the correct charge, because the family had no ill intent.
“There was no malice,” he said. “There was no bad faith.”
As for Mr. Adames’s warnings, the lawyer said that the former employee had his version of events, and that the Espaillats had theirs.
Many people expected the Espaillats to skirt responsibility because of their wealth, he said, and the charges prove them wrong.
Mr. Adames could not be reached for comment. In a television interview last week, he sobbed, pleaded for justice and said he feared for his life now that his warnings were public.
“Every Dominican family needs to know what happened,” he said.
Hogla Enecia Pérez contributed reporting from Santo Domingo.
Frances Robles is a Times reporter covering Latin America and the Caribbean. She has reported on the region for more than 25 years.
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