It was seconds': Kuzbass sauna administrator on teens' last minutes
The sauna employee tearfully pleaded with the court to avoid pre-trial detention.
The teenagers who died in the burned sauna in Prokopyevsk might have gotten scared and run towards the emergency exit, but suffocated. What happened in the hall during the terrible fire on Tuesday, February 3, the NGS42.RU editorial team learned from the only witness to the emergency, sauna administrator Elena Selishcheva.
The employee told us that smoke in the corridors of the two-story complex appeared suddenly. When she saw it, she was near the sauna hall where six teenagers were celebrating a birthday.
«I was shouting: »Get out, get out!« but only one girl ran after me. Everyone came out of the sauna, but only she came out of the building itself,» Elena recalled the events of that fateful evening.
According to the administrator, she never understood exactly where the flame spread from. She quickly ran out of the burning building, but remembering that a cleaner was left in the administrative block, she returned.
«I ran in, said: »Call the firefighters,« but it was already all dark, very smoky,» Elena told us, who was detained the day after the fire as part of a criminal case.
In the opinion of the accused, at the moment of the fire she did everything she could, at least saving the only survivor from the group of teenagers. Elena«s lawyer noted that the administrator was not responsible for fire safety at the sauna on Kubanskaya Street.
«She, essentially, could also have been harmed, she was placed and provided with such working conditions,» the lawyer told NGS42.RU editorial.
All decisions, according to the employee, were made by the owner Alexei Dolgachev and his brother, including the evacuation plan which he drew and installed with his own hands.
Meanwhile, at the court hearing on selecting preventive measures for the persons involved in the criminal case — the owner and the administrator — it became known that the sauna-hotel operated illegally, and all employees were hired unofficially.
What else is known about the owners of the killer sauna, how it remained invisible to inspections for many years, and why the party turned into a nightmare, we collected in a comprehensive article.
