The Devastating New Year’s Eve Fire in Crans-Montana

A horrific, preventable tragedy and a parent’s worst nightmare

It was meant to be a night of joy, the kind of night we collectively agree to trust, the kind that feels familiar and safe enough to stop watching the clock, the kind that makes us believe, especially as parents, that it’s safe, just for a few hours, to loosen our grip and let our kids step beyond our sight, trusting the world to keep them safe long enough to come home.

I’m writing this as a mother with a sixteen year old son, standing right at that age where freedom starts to stretch past your reach and trust becomes the thing you hold onto instead.

On New Year’s Eve in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, young people packed into a nightclub to celebrate the new year, bodies pressed close, music loud, champagne raised, sparklers flaring, because celebration always carries that quiet assumption that nothing truly bad will happen, that joy is durable, that the night will end the way nights are supposed to end.

Just after midnight, a fire broke out inside the club.

It started near the ceiling, which was low and flammable, and once it caught, it spread fast, too fast, filling the room with smoke and heat before the people inside could understand what was happening, before the place they trusted finished changing into something else.

From what I’ve read and heard in the reporting, there were no emergency exits people could reach, no clear way out once everything went wrong, and that thought alone makes my chest seize, because it means those kids were trapped inside a space that turned dangerous without warning, realizing in real time that there was nowhere to go, no door to run for, no clear path back to safety.

I keep thinking about what that must feel like in your body, that sudden, sickening understanding that escape isn’t possible, that the room itself has become the threat, and how fast everything must have changed in that instant, how joy vanished before it could even register, replaced by fear so immediate there was no time to understand what was happening.

I’ve seen the videos from inside the club, and they stayed with me because all I could think about were those kids, the same age as my son, at the exact moment in life where you start letting them go a little farther, believing the world will meet them with care.

I can’t get past the fact that so many of the people in that room were kids.

Teenagers.

Young enough to still be expected home.

This morning, I saw a video of a mother, filmed in the aftermath, as she searched for her son.

It was daylight and devastation, what remains when the noise is gone and the answers still aren’t there, and the particular cruelty of knowing that your child had been inside a place where something unspeakable happened and now couldn’t be found, only his name carried forward on the breath again and again, released into the open air with the fragile hope that it might reach somewhere that could answer back.

Her breathing was uneven, rushed, like her body was trying to outrun a thought her mind couldn’t survive, and she kept saying, over and over, in different words but always the same way, that she couldn’t imagine a world where her child was taken from her, that her mind simply wouldn’t allow it, that the idea of continuing on without him felt impossible, like being asked to live inside a reality that no longer made sense.

She was pleading with everything at once, with the universe, with strangers, with time itself, begging to be told where her son was, begging to know if he was alive, begging for someone to say his name back to her and anchor it somewhere real.

She said they’d given their DNA. And when she said it, something dropped in my stomach, because there’s something unbearable about realizing that love has brought you to a place where handing over pieces of your own body, in the hope of identifying your child, is now part of your life.

And now, she said, the long wait began.

She held up a photograph of her son again and again, her hands shaking, offering his face to anyone who would look, as if recognition itself might matter, as if being seen might keep him tethered to the living, as if someone might say I saw him and give her even the smallest piece of ground to stand on.

Watching her unraveled me.

Because I’m a mother too, and I could feel exactly where she was, trapped in that unbearable space where love has nowhere to land, where every possible outcome feels lethal, where you’re suspended between the terror of knowing and the terror of not knowing, and neither feels survivable.

I can’t stop thinking about how close their ages are to my son’s. How familiar their lives feel. How easily it could have been my child instead. This is the age where they still feel half grown, where they still come home hungry and loud and careless, where they think they have forever, because why wouldn’t they. And that’s the part that won’t let me breathe.

I can’t stop thinking about how none of them woke up that morning imagining joy would be the last thing they felt. About how they trusted that space to keep them safe. About how easily this could have been avoided. About how safety was assumed instead of ensured. About how celebration was prioritized over care until the cost was paid in human lives.

This wasn’t random.

This wasn’t fate.

This was preventable.

I spent New Year’s Eve with my own kids, my sixteen year old son sprawled nearby, playing Monopoly, laughing, arguing about rules, watching the ball drop, keeping them close in that instinctive way parents do even when we know we can’t do it forever. And now that memory feels sacred, because ordinariness is a gift you don’t understand until you see how easily it can be taken.

There’s already so much darkness in the world, and all we want as parents is to give our kids moments of joy, moments of light, moments where they don’t have to be afraid just for being young and alive. We want to trust. We want to believe that when we let them go to a club, to a party, to a night that should have been harmless, the world will honor the unspoken pact we make with each other to keep them safe.

This feels like a violation of that pact.

I pull my son close and think of the parents who can’t, of the children who went out celebrating and never came home, of the lives split cleanly into before and after by a single night. I think about how wanting to celebrate should never have put them in danger. And I sit with that, because there is nothing to explain, nothing to justify, nothing to soften. There is only love, and the unbearable cost of its loss.

And with that, today’s song. I don’t like his politics, but this song feels like the only choice today.

I love you guys!

Please stay strong, please stay safe, and please take care of one another.

💙 Jo