Report: Club Where DIMEBAG Was Murdered Continues To Be Blacklisted By Bands, Booking Agents

Aaron Beck and John Futty of The Columbus Dispatch have issued the following report:

Shortly after 10 p.m. on Dec. 8, 2004, Nathan Gale of Marysville climbed a security fence outside the Alrosa Villa nightclub.

The Texas heavy-metal band DAMAGEPLAN had just begun playing its first song, Breathing New Life.

Gale, 25, entered a side door, made his way through the crowd, walked around a stack of amplifiers and onto the stage, where he pulled out a handgun.

Within three minutes, five people were dead or dying, including guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, DAMAGEPLAN crew member Jeffrey Thompson, club security guard Erin Halk, audience member Nathan Bray and Gale, shot by a police officer.

Two other DAMAGEPLAN crew members, Christopher Paluska and John Brooks, and an audience member, Travis Burnett, were wounded.

A year later, echoes of the shootings can still be heard, from the nightclub to the state legislature and from Columbus to Texas.

The club: The graffiti honoring Abbott has been washed off the side of Alrosa Villa and the boulder that served as a makeshift memorial is largely free of the tributes.

But the shooting's legacy is very real at the North Side club.

Since the shootings, booking agents and a few bands have all but blacklisted the 31-year-old venue. This year, the club hosted eight national acts, compared with 20 to 25 a year before the shooting.

"We've lost a tremendous amount of money, not because of Columbus customers, but because bands won't play here," club owner Rick Cautela said. "And no band from Texas wants to play here."

The Houston band KING'S X, which played Nov. 12, was an exception, even though the band's singer, Doug Pinnick, was close to Abbott.

"Everybody didn't think about it at all until they got on stage and then it was really weird," said KING'S X road manager Jay Phebus. "But I mean, what are we going to do? Not play every place Dime played?"

The band: The surviving members of DAMAGEPLAN returned to Texas after the shooting and have played together only once since.

Bassist Robert "Bob Zilla" Kakaha doesn’t know if the band still exists.

"You'll have to ask Vinnie that one," he said recently, referring to drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, Darrell Abbott's brother.

Kakaha did say he plans to perform with Abbott and DAMAGEPLAN singer Patrick Lachman on New Year's Eve in the band’s home base of Arlington, Texas.

Lachman has formed a new band in San Francisco.

Since the shooting, Vinnie Paul Abbott has granted only one major [print] interview — to Guitar World magazine, which had published a column by his brother. Throughout the year, bands and musicians paid tribute to Darrell Abbott from concert stages. On Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas, nine heavy-metal bands will perform during "Dimefest."

Proceeds will go to the Dimebag Darrell Memorial Fund to cover medical and other costs of former DAMAGEPLAN crew mates Brooks, Thompson and Paluska.

The officer: Columbus Police Officer James Niggemeyer won't be on duty [Thursday night, December 8, 2005].

He decided several weeks ago that he didn't want to work on the first anniversary of the carnage at Alrosa Villa, which he ended by shooting gunman Gale.

"I didn't think my mind would be there," he said yesterday. "I'll just take the night off and relax."

One year later, Niggemeyer still wishes it could have ended some other way. But he remains convinced he made the right choice when he killed Gale.

A Franklin County grand jury cleared the officer, and a police review board ruled that he acted properly. Witnesses hailed him as a hero whose quick action saved lives. Awards and accolades rolled in.

The 32-year-old officer continues to work the night shift out of the same substation at Karl and Morse roads.

The trauma of that night lingers.

"It's still fresh," he said. "It's still something that's on your mind all the time."

The shooter: A year later, Gale's motive remains a mystery. Even a recently released 627-page police investigation contained few clues about what drove the Marysville man to such a rampage.

Gale's mother told investigators that her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2003 and may not have been taking medication.

Some estranged friends said Gale once told them that PANTERA, the Abbott brothers' previous band, had stolen lyrics from him, but investigators found nothing about the bands in a search of Gale's apartment.

Police also confirmed that Gale caused a disturbance on stage during a DAMAGEPLAN concert in Cincinnati eight months before the shootings at Alrosa.

But Bo Toler, the owner of a Marysville tattoo parlor, who spoke to an agitated Gale just hours before the shootings, said Gale expressed no interest in the Abbotts' bands.

"Gale never talked about the group PANTERA or Dimebag Darrell Abbott or going to any concert," Toler told investigators, and Gale "never mentioned anything that day about going to a concert later that evening."

The crackdown: Columbus officials have backed away from efforts to keep unaccompanied minors out of Alrosa Villa and other nightspots.

A few months after the shootings, police charged Alrosa Villa and the Newport Music Hall with violating an obscure state law prohibiting "public dance halls" from admitting minors without a parent or legal guardian.

But the city attorney's office conceded that the 80-year-old statute, also found in the city code, was outdated and difficult to enforce.

This fall, the city dismissed the charges and allowed the club owners to essentially pay a fine without entering a plea, said City Prosecutor Steve McIntosh.

State Rep. Larry Wolpert, a Hilliard Republican, is co-sponsoring legislation that would eliminate the dance-hall law.