$29.5 Million Global Settlement for Three Deaths and 40 Injuries in the Pier 34 Nightclub Collapse

Just before midnight on May 18, 2000, hundreds of patrons were dancing inside Club Heat, a crowded nightclub built on the end of Pier 34 along Philadelphia's Delaware River waterfront. Without warning, the century-old timber structure gave way. The dance floor and the people on it plunged into the river below. Three young women -- Jean Marie Ferraro, 27, Monica Kristina Rodriguez, 21, and DeAnn White, 25 -- drowned. Forty other patrons were injured in the collapse and the chaotic water rescue that followed.

The pier had been in documented decline for years. A study from the 1970s had pegged its useful structural life as ending around 1990 -- a full decade before the collapse. Engineers told the owners that proper repairs, including replacement of roughly 600 pilings, would cost more than $1.2 million. The owners declined, opting instead for cheaper bracing that was never adequate. In the weeks before the collapse, a widening crack in the nightclub floor was visible to anyone who looked.

Civil litigation named approximately two dozen defendants, alleging each had a role in allowing a nightclub to operate on a structure they knew, or should have known, could not bear the load. Robert Mongeluzzi of Saltz Mongeluzzi and Bendesky served as co-lead counsel alongside Thomas R. Kline of Kline & Specter. The case consolidated claims from three wrongful-death estates and 43 injured plaintiffs, all managed before Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge William J. Manfredi, whose six months of sustained judicial involvement the lead attorneys credited as essential to the outcome.

The three principal defendants -- pier owner Michael Asbell, Club Heat manager Eli Karetny, and investor Dorrance Hamilton -- reached a global settlement announced at a press conference on January 29, 2004. The total came to approximately $29.5 million. The estate of each of the three women who died received a quarter of the fund, roughly $7.4 million apiece. The remaining quarter, another $7.4 million, was divided among the 43 injured claimants through binding arbitration to set individual shares.

The same defendants faced parallel criminal charges. Asbell and Karetny were initially tried on third-degree murder counts; the jury hung. Karetny later pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment. Asbell entered no-contest pleas to involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment, conspiracy, and risking catastrophe. Both received sentences of house arrest and community service rather than incarceration.