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Americas|A Small City That Lost Big in the Dominican Nightclub Tragedy
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/world/americas/haina-dominican-republic-nightclub.html
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Dominican Republic Dispatch
Haina, a city just outside the Dominican capital, lost 25 people in the Jet Set disaster, including community leaders and cultural icons.
April 14, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
Half the board of directors of a seniors club perished, as did the president of the Lion’s Club, a high school teacher and the owner of a trucking company. Tony Blanco, a retired major league baseball player who died in the disaster, was a native son.
So was Rubby Pérez, the merengue singer whose concert drew more than 400 people — many from his hometown.
In the wake of a nightclub roof collapse that killed hundreds of people, the Dominican Republic is brimming in grief. That heartbreak is perhaps most palpable in Haina, an industrial city outside the capital that lost more than two dozen people in the tragedy, including community leaders and cultural heroes.
A gritty municipality best known for its bustling seaport and a legacy of lead pollution that once gave it the unwelcome moniker “the Dominican Chernobyl” now has another undesirable distinction. When the roof of the Jet Set disco came crashing down last Tuesday morning, killing 226 people, it dealt a heavy blow to the small city.
Twenty-five people from there were among those who died.
“God has a way of communicating with us, and sometimes it is difficult to understand,” the former Red Sox player David Ortiz, better known as Big Papi, said Sunday. Mr. Ortiz used to live in Haina, and traveled there to help bury its dead.
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