Jet Set roof collapse kills at least 98 in Santo Domingo

# Jet Set roof collapse kills at least 98 in Santo Domingo

*Event date: 2025-04-08*

At least 98 people were dead and 155 survivors had been hospitalized after the roof of Jet Set nightclub in Santo Domingo collapsed during a concert, NBC News reported. The collapse happened early Tuesday during a performance by merengue singer Rubby Pérez. Dominican emergency authorities said the death toll was still rising while rescuers searched the rubble for anyone who might still be alive.

The report says the cause was not yet clear. Owners of the club said they were cooperating with authorities to help victims and determine what happened. For investigators, that means the central question is still structural: whether the roof failed because of design, age, maintenance, crowd load or some other trigger. NBC’s account does not settle that, and it should not be guessed at.

The disaster quickly reached beyond the nightclub crowd. Dominican officials said the dead included a provincial governor, Nelsy Cruz, and two former Major League Baseball players, Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco. Pérez’s manager said he had been told the singer died after being hospitalized, but rescue chief Juan Manuel Méndez said later that search crews were still looking for him, showing how unstable the information flow remained in the first day after the collapse.

That uncertainty matters because the body count was still being assembled while hospitals dealt with the injured. Méndez said 155 survivors had been hospitalized by early Wednesday, and President Luis Abinader said at least 138 people had been rescued from the rubble by late Tuesday morning. The scale of the response suggests a major multi-agency operation that involved search, medical triage and identification at the same time.

The wider reaction was immediate. Abinader declared three days of mourning. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and other public figures issued condolences after the deaths of Dotel and Blanco, and the Dominican culture ministry confirmed that Nelsy Cruz was among the dead. Those public reactions underline how the collapse touched government, sport and the entertainment world in a single night.

For Santo Domingo, the Jet Set collapse became more than a concert tragedy; it became a national disaster with a still-fluid tally, an unknown cause and rescuers racing the clock. The reporting from NBC News shows a scene in which the dead, the injured and the unaccounted for were all still being sorted into categories that can change by the hour.

Jet Set also became a reminder of how quickly a venue tragedy can spread through public life. The dead included a local political figure and athletes with national recognition, which helped push the collapse beyond entertainment news and into the country’s broader civic conversation. The numbers were still moving, but the report already showed the scale of the loss and the difficulty of sorting rumor from confirmed fact while people were still being pulled from the debris.

The scale of the collapse also helps explain why information was so fluid. In a disaster that puts concertgoers, responders, hospital staff and families into the same news cycle, casualty counts rarely settle all at once. NBC’s report captures that fluidity: confirmed dead, many hospitalized, a search still underway and public figures issuing condolences before the final accounting was complete. That is the real shape of the story, and it is larger than any single name in the list of victims.