Maximo Peña had been coming to the Jet Set nightclub every single Monday for the past 30 years. This week, excited to see a concert by the popular Dominican singer Rubby Pérez, he took his wife and his sister. Now all three are buried beneath the rubble of the collapsed discotheque, after the roof caved in part way through the performance, leaving at least 184 dead.
“I haven’t heard any news about any of them,” says Shailyn Peña, Maximo’s 17-year-old daughter as she sits on a wall outside the devastated venue. “It was just another Monday night for them. In fact, my dad invited my mum to come too but at the last minute she decided not to go. It was a blessing in disguise.”
Behind her as she speaks, a team of rescue workers is meticulously going through the rubble inside the building, listening for the slightest sound of a survivor beneath them. They have been joined by Israeli and Mexican search teams and are using sophisticated heat-seeking equipment to try to locate anyone still alive.
Shailyn tells me her cousin is one of the rescue workers, sifting through the debris for her own uncle, which brings her peace of mind that a relative is inside, doing everything in her power to try to track him down.
But the uncertainty and the endless wait for information are becoming unbearable, Shailyn says. “I feel the urge to just go in there and push aside all the rocks and pull him out. But as much as I want to, I really can’t. I just have to sit here and wait it out.”
Source link
