"I was halfway across the floor, I could see the door, but the air turned black with this thick
smoke," he said. "I couldn't breathe. People started to panic and run toward the door. They were falling, screaming, pulling at each other."
The manager, meanwhile, was outside dealing with a drunk and belligerent young man. No one there had any inkling of the desperate scene unfolding just beyond Kiss' black, sound-proof double doors, said taxi
driver Edson Schifelbain, who was in his car, waiting for passengers.
A security guard poked his head out and said there was a fight. A fraction of a second later, someone inside yelled "Fire!" The manager opened the doors and it was like opening the gates of hell, Schifelbain said.
Young men and women, mouths and eyes blackened with soot, clothes tattered, tumbled out screaming and crying. Some ran right over his taxi and two other cabs parked nearby, breaking mirrors, windshields, bashing in the doors. Horrified, he realized his cab was in their way, but couldn't move it because there were bodies hunched over it, collapsed in front of the tires, everywhere.
"The horror I saw in their faces, the terror, I'll never forget," he said. Two girls gasping for air climbed into his car, and as soon as he was able, he sped the six miles (10 kilometers) to the university hospital.
"One of them was crying all the way, screaming, 'My friend is dying,'" he said. "I did what I could. I don't know what happened to those girls."
Inside the club, metal barriers meant to organize the lines of people entering and leaving became traps, corralling desperate patrons within yards of the exit. Bodies piled up against the grates, smothered and broken by the crushing mob.
Rizzi was stuck, unable to move, taking in gulps of
smoke, feeling the gaseous mix burn his lungs.
He was within seconds of passing out, he said, when the whole frenzied mass suddenly lurched forward. The gates gave way, and everyone toppled over. Rizzi was lying on top of two or three people, several more heaped on top of him. He stuck out his hands, smacking them against the sidewalk and door. Someone pulled him to
safety.
"To get out, I climbed, I pulled people's hair. I felt other people grabbing me, hitting me in the
face," he said. "It's hard to describe the horror. But once I was outside, I recovered, and started pulling out the others."
Soon, he said, the street was a sea of bodies.
This was the scene 24-year-old Gabriel Barcellos Disconzi found when he arrived about 3:30 a.m., an hour after fire broke out. Wakened by a phone
call from friends, the club regular immediately started pulling out bodies as
smoke spewed so thick that entering the building was unthinkable.