Crans-Montana, Switzerland
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The Flame of Le Constellation touched the hearts of too many young people on New Year’s Eve.
Still, the scars from that night have already spread far beyond the bar.
Days after the fire, local residents told CNN they were at a loss for what-ifs that night, choosing to change their plans at the last minute and celebrate outside a crowded bar or with family instead of friends.
“It should have been us.” “I should have gone too.” Days after the fire, a local resident said, “My brothers were there the night before.”
Now, those who were texting with potential victims in the hours before the disaster are glued to their phones, desperately waiting for information about their friends, who no longer respond.
Swiss police announced on Saturday that they had opened an investigation against the bar’s owners on suspicion of manslaughter, manslaughter and arson.
Swiss police also identified four of the victims, including two young women, aged 21 and 16, and two young men, aged 18 and 16.
The bar is popular with teenagers, and there is growing awareness in Crans-Montana that many of the dead were the youngest members of a community made up of locals and holidaymakers.
For their friends, the children, the events of that night are all they talk about, through horrifying videos of fiery panic that have been circulated on social networks.
“We’re asking what we would have done in their place,” 17-year-old Leonor Marquez told CNN. “We only talk about that.”
“As much as I want to turn the pages, I feel like I can’t,” she said, adding that “the subject matter keeps changing.”
As journalists and mourners gathered in front of Le Constellation on Friday morning, one scene captured the raw emotions still flowing through this small community.
The father’s face was wet with tears and he fell to his knees as he approached the bar.
After two dark nights and a difficult day, and after frantically gathering information, he still didn’t know if his son’s body could be in Le Constellation, his brother told CNN.
According to Swiss authorities, several patients hospitalized due to the fire have not yet been identified.
I can’t bear to wait for more information, and I continue to vacillate between hope and despair. One young man’s teenage cousin has remained missing since the fire.
“So there’s probably no chance he’s alive,” she told CNN after nearly two full days with no news of his whereabouts. She requested anonymity out of respect for her family.
Leonor Marquez, 17, is still waiting for news of two of her friends who she knew were at Le Constellation on Wednesday night, but she didn’t know their fate would be the most difficult.
“I feel helpless, like I can’t do anything,” she told CNN from Crans-Montana. “I don’t know if they’re alive or dead, if they’re doing well or badly. I can’t do anything. I can’t do anything at all.”
Amidst the tragedy, she said she found some comfort in learning that two of her friends were in medically induced comas in a hospital in Lausanne.
“What is that?” she said.
Amandine Chabanon, 25, a surgical trainee on vacation in Crans-Montana, was woken up by her mother when her teenage brother called from outside Le Constellation.
Rushing to the scene to help, she spent hours triaging victims with severe burns and providing life-saving aid alongside first responders and passersby.
She was focused on treating patients on the bank floor, inserting IVs and calming burn survivors, and identifying patients was not their priority.
All we were thinking was “evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,” she told CNN, even as some first responders tried to track down the names of the dozens of injured teens.
As she stumbled out of the bar, she said many of the young people reveling “didn’t really understand what was going on.”
“I had a girl. I remember she was there and her whole face was burned and she looked at me and said, ‘I’m going home.'” I took her and I said, ‘I’m not going home.’ ”
Doctor friends who worked the night shift on New Year’s Eve at a nearby hospital told Chavanon that they were struggling to cope with the influx of patients and had to turn away distraught parents looking for their children.
“It was just saving, saving, saving,” she said.
Photographs of Le Constellation’s final moments before the fire were released, showing revelers dancing under showers of sparks and jumping out of foam-covered champagne bottles raised several inches from the ceiling.
A video, presumably taken shortly afterward, shows young people dancing, laughing and filming the flames as they futilely attack them with towels.
As authorities direct an ongoing investigation into the role of sparklers, testimonies from survivors and those who rushed to the rescue are beginning to reveal the full story of that fateful night.
Paolo Campolo, a local resident who pulled revelers from the burning bar, said he had to pry open the back door of the bar to free those trapped inside.
CNN spoke to multiple teens who said they had visited Le Constellation multiple times and that the back door to the bar was usually locked.
The bar’s French co-owner told Swiss newspaper Tribune de Genève on Friday that the establishment had been inspected “three times in 10 years.”
“Everything was done according to the rules,” said Jack Moretti.
CNN previously reached out to Moretti and co-owner Jessica Ann Jeanne Moretti through their businesses.
In Crans-Montana, news of the living and the dead feels like a priority for many.
Dealing with this disaster is still not on people’s minds.
On Thursday evening, a father carried his toddler on his shoulders as he passed the covered fence that now marks Le Constellation.
“What happened there?” she asked him, and he grimaced as he searched for an answer, the weight of this tragedy indescribable.
“It was an accident, dear,” he answered.
