Chicago porch collapse kills at least 12, injures scores
At least 57 others were injured, some critically, authorities said.
"There were people covering me. It was pitch black and people were yelling, 'I'm dying.' I was assuming I was going to die," said Natalie Brougham, 22, who walked away with injuries to her hip and shoulder. "I guess I got lucky and only had two or three people on top of me."
As many as 50 people, most of them in their early 20s, had crammed onto the apartment porch for a party in the city's affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood when the floor fell at about 12:30 a.m., police said. There may have been beer kegs and dancing on the porch as well, authorities said.
Seven men and five women, most of them apparently on the porches directly below, were sandwiched between the falling floors and killed, said Larry Langford, spokesman for the city's Office of Emergency Management.
"There was no warning," said Simon Rasin, a University of Chicago law student who attended the party. "I fell through both the second- and the first-floor decks into the basement area in just a pile of bodies."
His friend Henry Wischerath was among those killed, he said.
"There was chaos," said James Joyce, Chicago fire commissioner. "There were people screaming and crying in the alley."
Partygoers who had been safe inside the apartment said they tried to rescue their friends, while people poured out of a nearby tavern to help.
"They were bloodied and covered in rubble, their clothes were ripped. Women were looking for husbands, men were looking for wives. It was horrible," said Geraldine Schapira, 33, who lives nearby.
Eleven people were pronounced dead at the scene, and the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office confirmed that a 12th person was dead on arrival at a hospital.
The building where the accident occurred was built in 1886. Like many of the brick row houses in Chicago, it was divided from a single-family dwelling into apartments. And like many other such buildings in the area, the wooden porches had been added.
City Building Commissioner Norma Reyes said a structural engineer had conducted a preliminary examination and determined that the porch was sound. But she said the city was unable to find a construction permit for the porch, which was built in 1998.
"It appears to be a case of just too many people in a small space," Joyce said.
Several of the residents of the six-unit building had combined to throw a party on the warm summer evening, survivors and witnesses said, and partygoers wandered from apartment to apartment, porch to porch — a common scene in the trendy neighborhood, which is surrounded by nightclubs and restaurants.
Most of the people at the party were friends in their early 20s, many of them graduates of New Trier High School in Chicago's northern suburbs, said Fina Cannon. She had been in the apartment's kitchen, looking out at the porch when it gave way. "All of a sudden I saw all these heads going down," she said.
Those killed were Wischerath, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y.; John Jackson, 22, of Kansas City, Mo.; Katherine Sheriff, 23, of Chicago; Eileen Lupton, 22, of Lake Forest; Shea Fitzgerald, 19, of Winnetka; Muhammed Hameeduddin, 25, of Chicago; Margaret Haynie, 25, of Evansville, Ind.; Sam Farmer, 21, of Winnetka; Eric Kumpf, 30, of Hoboken, N.J.; Robert Koranda, 23, of Naperville; Kelly McKinnell, 26, of Barrington; and Julie Sorkin, 25, of Glenview.
Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.