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In a stampede, caused by security actions. See here.
Early Monday morning — nearly seven months after the original shutdown order — as many as 500 people were crammed into the second-floor club when someone sprayed Mace or pepper spray to quell a fight. That apparently touched off the deadly stampede.
Grant said the club had been rented to private promoters — a firm he identified as Envy Entertainment. The promoters provided 18 security guards of their own in addition to 10 supplied by his clients, Grant said. He said it was the promoters' security guards who used the spray.
No phone number or business listing could immediately be found for Envy Entertainment.
Witnesses described a frenzied scene in the wake of the spraying: Some people were trying to climb through the ceiling while others were trampled in the frantic rush for an exit, their faces and bodies flattened against the glass front door.
Some people fainted on the club floor. Others were coughing and crying, gagging and blindly groping for any way out.
SMH version here.
Chicago fire commissioner James Joyce described how firefighters who were called to the building discovered "victims stacked in the stairwell next to the exit."
They also found that two other exits were either locked or blocked by bags of laundry from a restaurant on the ground floor. Firefighters were obliged to use "sledge hammers and iron prys to pry those doors open," said Joyce.
A former E2 security guard revealed that the rear exit was typically kept locked because managers didn't want clubbers sneaking in without paying.
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