CONN. SUIT OVER R.I. FIRE EXPANDED:

Lawyers from New London, Conn., have added 26 more defendants to a lawsuit on behalf of eight Connecticut residents who were killed or injured in The Station nightclub fire last year. One of the new defendants is a television cameraman who was at the club filming footage for a story. Other defendants added include insurance firms and a company that inspected the West Warwick nightclub before the fire. The amended lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Providence, pushed the number of defendants to 53. “Essentially we want to make sure that we have named every party that was involved in this fire to make sure that everybody liable is involved in this lawsuit,” Robert I. Reardon Jr., one of the lawyers working on the case, told The Day of New London, Conn. The original lawsuit, filed in June 2003 in U.S. District Court in Hartford, Conn., named 27 defendants, including the brothers who owned the nightclub, Michael and Jeffrey Derderian, West Warwick town officials and Anheuser-Busch Inc., which sold beer at the concert. The 141-page, 70-count Connecticut lawsuit sues the same defendants as its Rhode Island counterpart and adds seven more names that lawyers allege promoted the concert across state lines and lured people from Connecticut to see Great White. They include the Norwich, Conn., branch of Strawberries, a chain of East Coast music stores, which allegedly sold two tickets to the concert, and New London radio station WQGN, which gave away tickets to the concert. The Connecticut suit seeks compensatory damages of $100 million, punitive damages, lawyer’s fees and court costs.