Trial of defendants in the Kiss Club case enters today on the fifth day
The trial of four defendants for the crime of homicide in the fire at Nightclub Kiss in Santa Maria (RS), in January 2013, entered today (5) on the fifth day. This Sunday, the testimonies of Thiago Mutti, witness in the defense of one of the defendants, and of one of the victims, Delvani Brondani Rosso, are expected.
On Saturday, Cristiane dos Santos Clavé, who was at the establishment and lost 15 friends that night, testified.
She said that she was facing the stage and saw two fireworks stuck to the floor during a concert by Banda Gurizada Fandangueira. When he saw smoke, he felt a severe lack of air and left the place to breathe better, dodging several people who began to run and push themselves. “The smoke spread fast and got there ahead of me before I did. It was very hot, it was like steam from a pan”, he highlighted. Being close to the exit door, he managed to leave the club.
“It looked like a horror scene,” he said of the scene outside the club. “It went over the bodies,” he recalled. About her friend Leandro, (nicknamed Chupa), who died that day and was found near the bathroom, she said that “I'm sure he thought that was the way out”.
When asked by the judge about the feeling when giving testimony and reliving the facts, Cristiane said that she was doing it in memory of her deceased friends.
According to Christiane, the club had no signage and the fire was not announced. She also heard people being stopped at the exit of Kiss. "I'm sure a lot of people died without knowing what was going on."
The defendants in the lawsuit are Elissandro Callegaro Spohr and Mauro Londero Hoffmann, owners of the establishment, the vocalist of the band Marcelo de Jesus dos Santos, and the music producer Luciano Bonilha Leão.
Understand
The tragedy, which killed 242 people and left 636 injured, began on the stage, where the Banda Gurizada Fandangueira was performing, and soon spread, causing a lot of toxic smoke. One of the members fired a pyrotechnic device, hitting part of the building's roof, which caught fire.
The tragedy, which killed mainly young people, marked the city of Santa Maria and shook the entire country, due to the large number of deaths and the strong images. The club had only one unobstructed exit door. Firefighters and people tried, anyway, to open passages by breaking the walls of the house, but the delay in helping turned out to be tragic for the visitors. After the tragedy, rules for fire prevention in similar establishments were changed to ensure greater safety throughout Brazil.
Most ended up dying from inhaling toxic smoke from the sound insulation of the ceiling, formed by a flammable foam, incompatible with modern safety standards.
Since the fire, the families of the young people who died have formed an association and every year, on January 27th, they remember the tragedy, the biggest in the state of Rio Grande do Sul and one of the biggest in Brazil.
Text translated using artificial intelligence.
