Dirk Swain was on his first night out after escaping what should have been certain death.
The 20-year-old had just recovered from being shot in the head after a college football game – and finally felt ready to embrace his second chance at life.
But as he stood on the stairs of a New York gymnasium waiting to enter a celebrity charity event thrown by a relatively unknown 22-year-old music producer called Sean ‘Diddy‘ Combs, the expectant atmosphere began to change.
Minutes later, Dirk took his final breaths.
He was crushed to death during a stampede in the crowd at City College on December 28, 1991 – a night supposed to be filled with the excitement of basketball and music that turned into carnage.
Nine young people, including, Dirk were killed in the horrific crush that left 29 others injured.
The event, sponsored by the student government and promoted by Combs and rapper Heavy D, was held at the Nat Holman Gym, which had a legal capacity of 2,730.
But nearly 5,000 people showed up after tickets continued to be sold and a legendary New York City radio station encouraged more fans to attend, Dirk’s brother, Jason Swain, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
Dirk Swain was crushed to death at a celebrity charity basketball event in New York organized by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in 1991
It was, Swain said, a disaster waiting to happen. ‘They were still selling tickets and 98.7 KISS FM were still sending people there. That created an even bigger crowd,’ he said.
‘My brother and eight others got into the staircase first, and, when they announced they weren’t letting anyone else in, people were still outside with tickets.
‘They rushed through the doors, broke them, ran down the steps and the innocent got crushed by the crowd.’
In 1998, Combs testified in one of the multiple wrongful death lawsuits filed against him over the stampede.
He insisted that the deaths were not his fault and told the court that he was even caught up in the chaos.
Now he has been accused of dragging a woman into a dressing room and sexually assaulting her just minutes before the carnage unfolded, according to a lawsuit filed by ‘Jane Doe’ in December 2024. Combs has vehemently denied the allegations.
Swain recalled the horrors that his brother encountered as people screamed and gasped for air while they were being trampled.
During the chaos, more than a dozen emergency calls were made for certified medical personnel to arrive, and the police were not there to assist, he said.
Two friends managed to drag his brother out of the stairwell and into the gymnasium in a desperate effort to save him. It was too late.
‘Dirk was the first to be officially pronounced dead, at 7.50pm,’ Swain said. ‘He died with a ticket in his pocket.’
At the time, Combs was in his early twenties, and starting to make a name for himself by promoting and hosting events as an intern at Uptown Records.
Swain, 50, maintains that the disgraced rapper ‘never took accountability and never once apologized’.
Combs cooperated with the legal process in the aftermath and was never criminally charged.
He expressed regret for the tragic events that unfolded and insisted his actions were in good faith.
In a 1998 statement he said: ‘City College is something I deal with every day of my life.
‘But the things that I deal with can in no way measure up to the pain that the families deal with. I just pray for the families and pray for the children who lost their lives every day.’
Now, as Combs faces the possibility of life behind bars if convicted in his sweeping racketeering and sex-trafficking trial, Swain believes that justice might be about to catch up with the music mogul.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Back in 1991, Swain was a high school senior with plans to join Dirk, who was two years older, at Hampton University in Virginia.
The brothers had agreed to share an apartment and go through college life together.
‘He was my only sibling,’ Swain said. ‘After that night, a part of me died.
‘The first couple of years, I was in bad shape. I didn’t understand. I was positively obsessed. How did my brother go to a game and die? It didn’t make sense.’
The Swain Brothers: Jason (pictured left) said that a part of him died, too, the night Dirk was crushed to death. December will mark 34 years since the horrific incident
Dirk’s death was especially heartbreaking because he had narrowly survived a previous tragedy. Just three months earlier, he had been shot in the head on his college campus but managed to cheat death.
Swain said his brother had been protecting a girl at a fraternity party when someone opened fire.
‘My brother was recovering and it was his first time going out,’ he said, of Dirk’s presence at the basketball event.
It was the hottest ticket in Harlem. Everyone knew about it and wanted to go. Combs was even giving out tickets by hand.
‘We felt like we got Dirk back because he could have passed away in Virginia – and he comes back to New York and gets that ticket and gets crushed completely in the crowd.’
Swain said their father, a social worker, coped with his son’s loss by not talking about it while their mother, a former finance executive, was more forgiving.
‘My mother would say, “Jason, [Diddy] did not wake up that day and say, ‘I’m going to kill nine people.’ So just get off of that,’ he recalled.
‘My mother was in the deposition with him. He cried on my mother’s shoulder but he never at one time said he was sorry for anything.’
Shocking video footage from the game shows crowds of fans jammed into the gymnasium at City College New York
This harrowing image of Dirk’s friend laying on his body is featured in the documentary
Victims are seen lying on the floor, with friends desperately trying to save them
Dirk is pictured in a family photo. He died with his whole life ahead of him
The eight other victims of the City College stampede were: Jabaal Rainey, 15; Leonard Nelson, 17; Laytesha Heard, 19; Sonya Williams, 20; Yul Dargan, 24; Charise Ann Noel, 26; Darren Brown, 28; and Dawn McCaine, 20.
In 2011, Swain, a filmmaker, produced a documentary about the tragedy called ‘No Way Out (the Heavy D – Diddy) City College Stampede’, which he has recently updated.
The film opens with a harrowing image of his brother lying on the gymnasium floor covered with a white sheet. One of his childhood friends is seen resting his head on Dirk’s chest in frozen disbelief.
‘He vanished after that night,’ Swain said. ‘We never spoke again.’
Another friend, who survived the deadly crowd crush, kept silent for years until ‘he started working at Bad Boy Records’ – the label founded by Combs.
Swain said that his own trauma over Dirk’s death had been compounded by fury that more wasn’t done afterwards. Within a few months, he said, no one ever talked about it again.
‘They tucked it under the rug. The people who supposedly supported us at the time completely disappeared, like [the civil rights activist] Al Sharpton and [the hip-hop artist] Doug E. Fresh.
‘Some of the people that would come to the memorial and talk to us and were so positive became employees of Sean Combs and that was it. They blamed the kids and said they scapegoated him,’ he said.
Furthermore, Swain didn’t discover that Combs was accused of sexual assault that night until only recently.
‘I had no knowledge of that,’ he said about the allegation.
‘If those claims are true, it would be deeply disturbing.’
Jason Swain was only 17 and a senior in high school when his older brother Dirk was killed
Combs has denied the alleged assault and has filed a motion to dismiss the case. The lawsuit has been stayed in court and no evidence has been presented.
‘Mr. Combs vehemently denies the allegations,’ a spokesman for his legal team told the Daily Mail.
‘He and his legal team have full confidence in the facts and the integrity of the judicial process, and they look forward to clearing his name.’
Swain also questioned whether such an alleged dressing-room encounter, if true, meant that Combs’s focus would have been directed away from the security and the swell of the crowd.
The surviving families of the victims looked for someone to blame and eventually sued Combs, Heavy D and others. The damages demanded from multiple lawsuits reached around $500 million.
Combs settled for his alleged part in eight of the nine wrongful death suits. Many of them were concluded in secret but a report from Fortune Magazine suggests that he paid a total of $600,000 in damages.
Swain said that Combs settled quickly, giving his family $40,000.
‘There were ten defendants and that was his portion based on the monetary value of a college student,’ he said. ‘Which was crazy.
Dirk Swain (in the red) and his brother Jason (bottom right kneeling down) would play basketball for hours and were looking forward to attending the same college before his excruciating death
‘He was told what he owed and he paid – so he wasn’t slow with that. My mother said it came the next day after there was a judgement, but Heavy D took forever.’
The event had been billed as a charity fundraiser for AIDS research.
‘He supposedly raised about $60,000,’ Swain said. ‘In 1991, AIDS was killing a lot of people like the pandemic recently. I feel like he used that and oversold the concert. It was just bad business.’
Combs (pictured front center) with members of the R&B group Jodeci, Mr. Cee and Andrew Harrell at the Def Jam Records Christmas party in December 1991
In pictures shot at Diddy’s penultimate party in 2008, scantily clad, half-naked girls cavort in the swimming pool
When the stampede happened, Combs was dating Misa Hylton, the mother of his first child, Justin Dior Combs, who was born in 1993.
Misa attended the event with her best friend Sonya Williams, who was one of the nine victims crushed to death.
One of the details that still haunts Swain to this day is the boot mark left on Sonya’s face.
‘It was so horrific, the family had to do a closed casket,’ he said.
Though they did not travel in the same circles the Swain brothers crossed paths with the hip hop artist.
Swain went to Mount Saint Michael Academy, the same school as Combs who was a few years older, and Combs’s sister Keisha and Dirk went to Spellman High School in the Bronx.
Keisha and Dirk were classmates and graduated together but Swain was not sure if they were friends.
He recalled once speaking to Diddy about an ‘E! True Hollywood’ clip he was in. ‘He told me ‘Nah, nothing was overbooked.’
Swain added: ‘I can’t get around showing no accountability in 1991 that was something that still happened in the beginning of your career.’
December will be 34 years since the horrific night. ‘I’m not angry any more but, I have to say, that was a tough transition to adulthood. I was extremely close with my brother and one day he did not come home,’ he said.
‘I would have respected Diddy more if he would have said he was sorry. He’s almost untouchable. He would get in trouble and nothing would happen. He is protected all the time and he lies.
‘I believe he is finally getting what he deserves,’ he said. ‘I believe very much in karma.’
Dirk’s name is spelled out in a heart that was etched into the pavement at Parkchester Park in the Bronx where the Swain brothers spent a lot of time together. They lived in an apartment nearby until 2008 when their father passed away
In 2009, Swain and his parents founded The Dirk Swain Foundation, a nonprofit organization created to honor Dirk’s memory and those of the eight other victims of the City College stampede.
The foundation serves as a platform to keep their stories alive while working to uplift the community as a means of turning their devastating loss into a positive.
It focuses on educating and empowering young people aged 13 to 18 about the kinds of stressors that can lead to physical, emotional or mental harm.
‘It was a way to memorialize my brother and the others,’ Swain said. ‘We hold a memorial at City College every year. This was about making sure their names are not forgotten.’
In 2020, he revised Part 1 of the documentary ‘No Way Out (the Heavy D – Diddy) City College Stampede’ when he came back to New York from Los Angeles to care for his mother who has since passed away.
He said she had been born on Mother’s Day and described her as ‘an angel’.
‘That isolation pushed me to create again. She [my mother] told me: “Don’t stop until it’s done”,’ he said. ‘The industry wasn’t interested in a story about Combs – now they are but mostly for the assaults. Some of us are focused on honoring the nine who died.
‘I have dedicated my life to this,’ he said. ‘And that drive from the 90s is back.’
Part 2 of the documentary is in development but Swain said he was trying to get a production company to partner with him.
He is also working on a book.
