Nightclub Collapse in Santo Domingo Leaves at Least 184 Dead

At around 1:00 a.m. on 8 April, the roof of the popular Jet Set nightclub in the Dominican Republic collapsed on top of a crowd of nearly 300 people.

The club, located in the capital city of Santo Domingo, was hosting a performance of merengue artist Rubby Pérez at the time of the collapse. The destruction of the building has already become one of the nation’s deadliest tragedies in recent history—at least 184 deaths have been reported.

Officials have not yet provided an exact death toll; however, Juan Manuel Méndez, director of the Emergency Operations Center, reported that 145 people that had been rescued on Tuesday were still alive.

On Wednesday, 9 April, emergency responders said that they were ending “rescue efforts after recovering another 20 bodies from the rubble,” CNN reported. No one removed from the building was extracted alive since Tuesday afternoon.

“The authorities have not said how many people were at the concert, but said they are ‘triangulating’ the number of tickets sold with the number of people in the hospitals and at the morgue to figure out how many people might still be trapped in the rubble,” The New York Times reported.

The nightclub first opened its doors in the 1970s at a different location but had since moved to what used to be a movie theater.

The club attracted several big names, as did live music performances on Monday nights. During Pérez’s performance, videos showed him on stage as attendees began to wonder about items falling from the ceiling before a loud boom and the roof’s collapse ended the show.

While many of the victims have not yet been identified or accounted for, two of the fatalities include former Major League Baseball players—Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco. Both men died after the collapse, Dotel on the way to the hospital. Also among the victims were Pérez; Nelsy Cruz, governor of the Monte Cristi province; the son of the nation’s minister of public works, along with his wife and the wife’s brother (owner of one of the country’s most respected banks) and sister-in-law; a number of U.S. residents; and at least one U.S. citizen. Another MLB veteran, Pedro Martínez, posted on his social media that some of his family members were still missing in the wake of the incident. 

Authorities have not yet determined the cause of the collapse.