SANTA MARIA, Brazil — The band was revving up, and Luciene Louzeiro was right where she wanted to be at 2:30 a.m. Sunday, in front of the stage. As hundreds of people around her in the crowded nightclub began to dance, she saw something shoot from the stage toward the ceiling: a flare.
“No one cared because they always do that, to make us dance a little harder,” said Ms. Louzeiro, 32, a saleswoman at a clothing store who went to the nightclub, Kiss, to celebrate a friend’s birthday. But when she looked up, she saw that the ceiling was on fire.
“I started screaming, and thought, ‘When it’s your time to go, it is God who decides,’ ” she said.
The tragedy that unfolded next — a stampede away from a raging fire, a panicked struggle to open exit doors blocked by security guards and the deaths of more than 230 people, many of them university students, from asphyxiation and burns — has stunned a nation where the current attitude has typically been one of confidence and satisfaction after nearly a decade of robust economic activity.
The description of the mayhem from survivors and statements by band members themselves, two of whom were taken into police custody on Monday in connection with the fire, revealed a frantic struggle for survival that lasted no more than a few minutes.
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