Kelvin Espinal spent three days at Santo Domingo Morgue this week.
His cousin, Jadira Elaine Estevez Serrano, was one of 221 people who died when the roof collapsed early Tuesday at the Jet Set Nightclub in the capital of the Dominican Republic. His cousin, who was like a sister, passed away the day before his 42nd birthday.
And like dozens of other families, Mr. Espinal had not yet received the body of his loved one for burial.
“We spent Tuesday until 12pm,” Espinal said Thursday afternoon. “We were here on Wednesday and all day.”
On Thursday, Dominican Republic authorities concluded their search for the bodies trapped in a Jetset nightclub where the roof collapsed during the concert, killing 221 people. Another 189 people were rescued from Kawara Rub.
The Emergency Operations Center handed over the site to the prosecutor’s office to feature the investigation. Now there are some difficult parts. Just as hundreds of people gathered for a concert, they found out why the roof of a former cinema crashed 50 years ago.
The roof fell into the jet set, Santo Domingo’s famous disco, early Tuesday. That Monday’s live night was a decades-long tradition that was popular with politicians, athletes and business class. The governor passed away, as did the family of two former major league baseball players and the well-known banker.
The body of meringue singer Ruby Perez, who was performing, was pulled from the wreckage Wednesday morning. Many of his fans in Haina, his hometown of Haina, a city just outside the capital, were held at his concerts to collective awakening at a local recreation center.
Authorities repeatedly refused how many people there were in the club, but on Thursday morning they said everyone had been explained.
“These figures saddened the country,” said Juan Manuel Mendes, director of the Emergency Business Centre, during the announcement. “The Dominican family lament.”
After several days and days of media briefings, Mendes paused for nearly a minute and broke his sobs.
“Thank you, my Lord, because today we have concluded the most difficult task I have had in 20 years heading to the Operations Center,” he said between tears. “I ask for forgiveness because every time a person reports a missing family, we were full of helplessness knowing that the person was still locked up and that we were unable to reach them.”
A colleague comforted Mr Mendes, who handed the microphone over to someone else to finish the press conference.
Authorities praised the timely and thorough search.
Jose Luis Froya Jerasme, the city’s fire department head, said some rescuers were on the scene for 53 consecutive hours.
“I’ve never seen anything like I’ve always done all sorts of rescue,” frometa said. “The rescuers are pleased with a well-made job knowing that they have been able to save 189 wounded people on record. That’s a blessing for rescuers in America.”
Víctor E, Minister of Health. Atallah assured his family that his relatives were not suffering.
“I want to repeat that for the happiness of our family, our time here has been spent in the most effective and humane way possible,” Atala said. “The majority — and I say this with all my heart — died instantly.”
However, the family said they encountered logjams of people trying to drive the victims out of the morgue.
The family of Yeimy Aquino, who has four children, was trying to make sure her body was in the medical inspector’s office. Her husband, Juan Francisco Peña, explained how Aquino was hanging out with her friends near the stage where Perez was performing.
Like everyone else, he and his family were in the morgue for more than 24 hours.
As the morgue is officially called, the Institute of Forensic Pathology said it had received 220 bodies by Thursday morning, of which 146 were identified. Medical inspectors were conducting autopsies and making “constant efforts” to compare voter roles with biometric data, the agency said in a statement.
“We understand the emergency and will use the resources we need to provide timely responses,” the office said.
Club representatives refused to say how many tickets were sold at the concert on Monday night. The nightclub’s capacity ranged from 700 to 1,000 people, making it particularly popular on Monday nights.
Mendes said officials triangulated the number of tickets sold at the morgue and at the number of people in the local hospital.
On Wednesday night, authorities said rescuers had “used all reasonable possibilities” to find a living person, and the operation officially shifted from search and rescue to physical recovery.
“This hurts a lot,” Mendes said.
Later, in a brief phone interview with the New York Times, Mendes said the missing people were not described.
“There’s no single body left there,” Mendes said. “We combed the entire area.”
