It was just past midnight. The warm June weather was perfect for a porch party at the Lincoln Park apartment building, just steps from DePaul.
Partygoers, many of them law school students and 20-something professionals, drank keg beer and chatted outside on back porches at the 713 W. Wrightwood Ave. three-flat. It was a nice, normal night.
Then it happened.
The third-floor porch gave way, caving onto the second-floor porch and barreling down to the ground floor and basement stairwell-all in a matter of seconds. The collapse trapped, buried and crushed people underneath a mess of wooden debris. Thirteen of them died and more than 50 were injured.
That night-June 29, 2003-forever changed lives. It became national news and a flashpoint for controversy in Chicago, sparking lawsuits affecting victims, family members, city officials and property owners. NBC's "Chicago Fire" featured a porch collapse storyline in its debut season. The network's medical drama "ER" based a 2005 episode on the incident.
A decade later, the Lincoln Park porch collapse lingers with survivors and rescuers even though they've moved on to the next stages of their lives: marriage, children and established careers. The horrific scene-people screaming, moaning and bleeding as others were clinging to porch railings to keep from falling on the pile-still is extremely vivid.
To them, it serves as a reminder to cherish life, and as a cautionary tale warning Chicagoans to be more aware of porch safety.
"It is certainly the most catastrophic single porch collapse in Chicago," said Francis Patrick Murphy, a partner at the law firm of Corboy & Demetrio, which represented a number of victims in subsequent lawsuits.
Although the city at first blamed overcrowding for the incident, it later charged that the porch was bigger than code allowed, improperly constructed and without permits. Building inspectors had never cited those violations before the collapse.
In the aftermath of the collapse, victims' families and injured survivors filed lawsuits against the property owner, manager, porch contractor and the city, the last of which an appellate court ruled could not be held liable. The suits ultimately were settled with the property's insurance companies for a total of $16.6 million, with the latest court saga ending in appellate court earlier this year.
The city also fined the property owner $108,000 and the porch contractor $25,000. It clarified and strengthened the building code and launched inspection sweeps. Officials created a 311 service-request code for porch complaints and enacted a policy to inspect porches year-round rather than seasonally.
Since that time, the spotlight on porch inspections has dimmed. The Tribune reported in 2009 that the city disbanded its special task force of porch inspectors after most of the problem spots identified in the initial blitz were fixed. There are fewer building inspectors employed by the city today than there were in 2003 due to economic cutbacks, the city said, but building inspectors have been cross-trained on the changes made to the building code. Meanwhile, the number of porch complaints has decreased over the years-a sign, the city says, of better compliance from property owners.
"The city is very aggressive in responding to porch complaints," said Susan Massel, spokeswoman for the Buildings Department. "Six to seven days is a very good response time, and we think that shows we take it very seriously. Ultimately, maintaining private property is up to the property owner."
Murphy, who has been involved in various porch-collapse cases for more than 35 years, notes that rickety porches remain a concern in Chicago. Not all of them get inspected, he said, and builders still skirt the law when they build and remodel new ones without permits.
Meanwhile, the Wrightwood building remains-though it has changed slightly.
Apartments still are rented there, but metal bars block the doors that once opened to wooden porches. There are no porches in the back, only a rear metal stairway with landing pads. The only sign indicating that such a tragedy occurred is a placard posted that reads, "Porch for tenant use only. No parties or gatherings."
Will Primack, 36, survivor
Will Primack's knee aches when he runs long distances and trains for triathlons.
A medical student at the time, he stayed at the porch party that night while some friends ventured to downtown bars. Without warning, he fell from the third-floor porch, tore a ligament in his knee and later needed surgery.
"I've only been hit in the face once, punched in the face once. It was so sudden. It was like a blinding flash of light," said Primack, now a professor in Phoenix.
"It was the same sensation when the porch fell. It happened so fast. I sort of lost consciousness and felt like I had been run over by a freight train."
After he pulled himself from the debris, he helped others climb out.
For Primack, that night feels like it was more than 10 years ago. He switched careers to become a teacher and moved to Arizona.
That's where he met his wife of five years-after he overheard her tell her friend about falling off a balcony in London.
Even though his life is different, surviving the collapse has prompted Primack to cherish what he has now even more.
"I don't know any of the people who died there. I don't personally know any of them," Primack said. "But having a family now, having a wife and having a close relationship with my family back in Chicago, I can't even begin to fathom losing them, losing someone close to me, like some of the families lost children. It'd be devastating."
Geoffrey Rapp, 37, survivor
Geoffrey Rapp's two-year stint in Chicago was bittersweet.
He had been working as a lawyer and living in the city for six months when he went to the party on the second floor. He heard a cracking noise, looked up and saw the porch collapse.
He fell about 15 feet and landed right by the edge of the basement pit. He staggered out of the pile and leaned against a building in the alley as blood poured down his face from a head wound that would require a dozen stitches.
In the following months, surviving the collapse had a profound effect on him.
"It made me reflect on how short life can be and how important it is to try to make your mark and to treat people well, because you never know when it's going to end," said Rapp, a law professor at the University of Toledo.
"The people who passed away were around the same age as I was, around the same place in life. For them, it was one night and it was all over. As that sunk in, I realized it had been a particularly moving experience in my life."
The next year, he met his wife. Now, even going out on a porch at his Ohio home with his two children causes him anxiety.
Rapp was one of three dozen who filed lawsuits. He had medical expenses from that night and wanted to get answers on how the collapse happened.
But that didn't happen as thoroughly as he would have liked, he said, because a court ruled the city could not be held liable and the plaintiffs agreed to settle with insurance companies. There was no trial and no public mea culpa from anyone who was responsible, he said.
"It's, to me, an entirely preventable tragedy-one that, although not in the same magnitude, seems to occur again and again," Rapp said. "We have a city that's taking our tax dollars, that's supposed to be protecting us, and I feel in this case they really let the people down."
James Johnson, 46, responder
One glance across the street from Burwood Tap and James Johnson gets a sinking feeling, knowing what happened at the apartment building was so unexpected and tragic.
Johnson, who was working as the bar bouncer that night, became acutely aware of the frailty of life.
The doorman had noticed a commotion outside, stepped out the door and asked what was going on. When somebody said the porch collapsed, Johnson ran down the street and up the alley to help. What he saw frightened him.
"When I stepped back there, there's bodies all over the alley and off the porch. To be honest with you, my first reaction was to back away," said Johnson, a personal trainer who works a couple of nights a week at the bar. "But there was one girl that was laying there. She had a piece of board coming through her arm and she looked at me and said, 'Please help me.' It just shocked me enough that I just grabbed her and carried her out."
Johnson, along with the bar manager, helped turn a grassy patch near Burling Street into a triage area, bringing buckets of ice and linens from the bar to the scene.
He had been to porch parties in the past and never thought anything of it. And since, he stays away from porches with more than three people. When he sees a porch, he eyes the construction and wonders if it is safe.
The collapse made him realize that life can change in an instant. "It makes me live my days. I look at each day as a gift," said Johnson, who lives in Andersonville. "That day changed me. Because from that day on, when I woke up in the morning and walked out my door, I honestly told myself there's a chance I may not come back here."
Amy Ulrey, 35, survivor
Amy Ulrey woke up in a sweat one night the summer after the porch collapse. A nightmare that she was falling brought her back to "that hellish place."
That place where she stood three feet away from her childhood best friend, Margaret Haynie, laughing and teasing her about her noisy flip-flops on the third-floor porch just before it collapsed. That place where she begged God to help her as a bike pinned her against a wall until a firefighter pulled her out of the wreckage. That place where Haynie died.
"That night took a lot of my innocence away, my carefree feeling that everything is great and everything will be great," said Ulrey, now a high school guidance counselor in Boonville, Ind.
She often thinks about that night, which was a few days before a teacher conference. "I was really, really mad at God for a long time. You know, 'God has a plan.' Well, what kind of plan is that to kill 13 people? That makes no sense," Ulrey said. "Sometimes, I still feel like that, like I'm tired of waiting to find out what the answer or the purpose of that was."
Time hasn't completely healed the married mother of a 5-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter. Although the nightmares have subsided and the physical pain is gone, she carries a heavy burden of survivor's guilt.
"Any time I would start getting mad or upset about things that were happening, even if they were legitimate, I'd be like, 'This isn't fair. Margy doesn't get to be here and even go through this, and she'd give anything just to be mad about something, and I need to not be mad about this,'" she said.
"I wanted to be happy again. I wanted to rejoice. I wanted to live life to the fullest. That's what Margy would have wanted. But I felt very, very guilty."
For three months after the collapse, she called Haynie's phone as often as five times a day to listen to the outgoing message because she was afraid she would forget the sound of Haynie's voice or laugh. She still cannot delete Haynie's number.
She cried a lot that first year and sought counseling after the collapse, Ulrey's husband, Ryan, said. In the past few years, she has talked about Haynie without getting as upset. Some things she would have wanted to share with Haynie, such as the way her daughter organized her cosmetic Caboodles case like Haynie used to, make her smile.
But going to a funeral home for a death, for example, still bothers her, he said. "If it is at the same one as Margy's, she gets real nervous ahead of time, takes lots of deep breaths once we are inside, and I think she relives Margy's showing and funeral," Ryan said. "It's very sad actually."
Haynie's birthday was a few days before the collapse, so that week is a difficult time for Ulrey. She mentions Haynie more, gets down in the dumps and has trouble sleeping, her husband said.
To honor her friend, she gets together with close girlfriends and takes her children to the local zoo because Haynie loved animals.
"I think every year, 'Oh, this year, it's going to get better,'" she said. "I'm just going to wake up and it's just going to be another day. But that hasn't happened yet."
Jason Kradman, 35, rescuer
Jason Kradman was standing in the third-floor kitchen 10 feet away from the porch-the porch he was on earlier-when he heard a cracking noise. He rushed over to the kitchen's open sliding-glass door. The floor outside was gone.
Kradman and five other partygoers formed a human chain to rescue a few people who were hanging onto the railing that stayed intact. After the group pulled them back inside the kitchen, Kradman ran out the front door and around the block to the alley, where he removed wood from on top of people.
That night and the people who died weigh on his mind, though he rarely talks about it. He has vowed to take nothing for granted. "It just makes me think about what's important to you in life, and just how life can be taken away from you in a split second when you're having fun with your friends," said Kradman, now a high school football coach in Miami. "You don't think you're necessarily putting yourself in harm's way or in danger, and all of the sudden something crazy like that happens."