NEW YORK – Sean “Diddy” Combs, the music mogul, is currently facing more than a month behind bars at a Brooklyn facility as he awaits trial for serious charges related to federal sex trafficking and racketeering, which could spell trouble for the career of the former billionaire artist.

This three-time Grammy winner, who once basked in the limelight alongside the elite, has swapped his stylish Gucci outfits for a plain brown prison jumpsuit. He strongly denies the serious accusations against him, even as fresh allegations of aggressive behavior continue to surface.

At 54 years old, Combs has a past of escaping legal troubles, including a 2001 verdict of not guilty on firearm and bribery charges, as well as a 2015 incident where he was arrested for assaulting his son’s college football coach.

However, Combs’ initial encounter with notoriety occurred many years ago, approximately 13 miles from the Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was implicated in the tragic deaths of nine young individuals due to a fatal crowd crush during a basketball charity game he hosted at City College of New York.

Some of the victims were close friends of his.

As Combs strives to reclaim his freedom and his wealth, the families of those impacted by the tragic event are revisiting the darkest moment of their lives, alongside the celebrity’s reluctance to accept responsibility for the calamity at City College.

“He over-advertised the event, he played a key role in its promotion, and he deserted the people trapped on the staircase without opening the door,” declared filmmaker Jason Swain, whose brother lost his life that fateful night in December 1991. “He has never taken accountability for it.”

“Since the City College incident, there has always been a shadow hovering over him,” noted Zach Greenburg, author of “3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise.”

Leading Up to the Tragedy

The promotional flyers advertised a spectacular event.

Rappers Puff Daddy and Heavy D were at the helm of a star-studded charity basketball game. Featured were renowned acts like RUN-DMC, Boyz II Men, EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Jodeci, and Brand Nubian, with DJ Funkmaster Flex among the expected attendees.

The venue? City College in Harlem, a long-established institution known for producing Nobel laureates and business leaders over the past century.

In early December, Combs, then a promising young executive at Uptown Records, approached the student government about hosting a benefit for AIDS education following basketball icon Magic Johnson’s public announcement of being HIV-positive—news that was groundbreaking at the time given the stigma surrounding the disease.

Operating under the name Puff Daddy, he secured the college gym at the science building for the event. Amid the holiday season, administrators approved the benefit scheduled for December 28 with little scrutiny.

Combs assured them that he would manage the security arrangements and aggressively marketed the game, making radio appearances and distributing 10,000 flyers throughout upper Manhattan.

He sold approximately 1,440 advance tickets priced at $12 each, while handing out an additional 100 tickets to friends and guests.

Unknown to the school administration, the event was set to feature a lineup of the biggest stars in hip-hop.

The Crowd Grows

As the clock struck 4 p.m. on December 28, a line of between 1,500 and 2,000 attendees was already forming outside the Nat Holman Gymnasium for the 6 p.m. event. The crowd behaved well initially.

Among them were Dirk Swain, a junior at Hampton University, and Sonya Williams, a nursing student at Lehman College in the Bronx. Friends with Combs’ associate, Williams was persuaded to attend after being offered a free ticket.

Sales at the door were brisk, with at least 500 tickets sold for $20 each, and attendees began to flood into the gym as the excitement built. However, confusion arose when Combs’ security team permitted both advance ticket holders and same-day purchasers to enter through two lines at the same time, causing concern among those who had bought tickets ahead of time about whether they would gain entry. Furthermore, some individuals were trying to sneak in without having paid for tickets.

What began as calm quickly escalated into chaos.

A Box of Cash, A Surge of People

As more guests noticed the arrivals of celebrities like Mike Tyson and LL Cool J at a VIP entrance, the atmosphere shifted from anticipation to frenzy, leading to pushing and shoving among the crowd. Police officers present began to struggle with the growing disorder.

Reinforcements were summoned. Barricades fell, glass shattered, and chaos ensued with children getting trampled in the rush.

Combs’ security personnel, who weren’t in uniforms, seemed to neglect crowd control, according to witnesses. Initially, they concentrated on ticket sales and monitoring entry to ensure that only ticket holders accessed the lobby and were directed down a stairwell to the gym, as the testimonies indicated.

As the tumult escalated, ticket sales were suddenly halted, and one of Combs’ aides snatched the cash box and escaped with the head of his security team into the lobby, descending to the gym while hastily closing the vestibule doors behind them as others tried to follow.

At 6:23 p.m., as the crowd overwhelmed the police, Combs’ security, and the college’s hired security guards, a voice on the police radio remarked: “They’re not people, they’re animals.”

Inside the gym, the burly chief of security drew a gun and started shouting racial slurs at the people gathered in the stairwell. He pushed a table against the doors to block the throngs pushing from the other side.

The four doors opened outward into the stairwell, with a multitude of kids pressing against them and new arrivals joining every second. However, the far-left door remained slightly ajar due to the hands of those at the bottom trying to pry it open.

The table served as a barricade to prevent anyone from squeezing through that narrow opening, while the armed security man climbed on top to weigh it down.

The surge

An estimated 50 individuals, including aspiring architect Dirk Swain and nursing student Sonya Williams, found themselves trapped on the other side when mayhem broke out in the lobby, and hundreds of kids surged forward, unaware that those downstairs were stuck between the crowd and the doors.

“You couldn’t escape because people kept coming down, thinking the gym was open,” recounted Frederick Holloway, who had come as a guest of the hip-hop duo Nice & Smooth. “It was just the door and the people—colliding together.”

The doors felt like a dam “holding back a flood of people,” Holloway remembered.

The crush was so intense that Nicole Levy, a guest of Combs, claimed her feet “lifted off the ground and never came back down.”

The air turned stifling, and some individuals began to faint. Others closer to the slightly ajar door – closer to a scarce supply of oxygen – kept shouting that they couldn’t breathe.

The cop and the cash

Near the front of the deadly crush, a few individuals managed to escape. Like others above ground, the police were unaware of the dire crush occurring just a short distance away.

Officer Sean Harris, a 10-year veteran of the NYPD, had earlier attempted to disperse the crowd from the upstairs lobby before retreating to the sidewalk. Now, he turned to see frantic kids banging against the glass from inside, crying out for air and ambulances.

He forced his way to the stairwell and noted that it was “literally wall to wall.”

“You couldn’t get through,” he testified.

Harris climbed atop the bannister and began a shaky descent until he lost his balance and fell onto the overcrowded group. The trapped patrons lifted the officer over their heads, and young arms passed him along until he reached the bottom of the stairs, where he pushed open the cracked door and landed, gasping, onto the table that served as a barricade.

The first thing Harris noticed, as later detailed by Court of Claims Judge Louis Benza, was “Combs standing there with two women, and all three had money in their hands.”

The horror

Combs was shocked by the devastation he witnessed on the other side of the doors, he later shared. He joined the effort to pull victims from the stairwell and attempted CPR on Williams, a close friend of his girlfriend. Sadly, she did not survive.

Dirk Swain, age 20, also never regained consciousness, alongside seven others between the ages of 15 and 28. “He died with his ticket in his pocket,” Jason Swain noted.

The medical examiner determined that the cause of death for each victim was “asphyxia due to compression of the chest,” finding no broken bones.

Confusion hampered the emergency response, with ambulances taking 19 minutes to arrive. The police duty captain initially refused to send officers to the gym, mistakenly believing they had been barred from entering, even as individual officers went down to assist the victims.

A reckoning

Judge Benza concluded that the college bore 50% of the responsibility for the deaths and injuries, while Combs and Heavy D shared the remaining 50%. He stated that school officials failed to take multiple chances to avert the impending catastrophe while aggressive ticket sales and promotion by Combs and Heavy D ensured a crowd size that was impossible to manage.

Combs testified that he too narrowly escaped the crush, but Judge Benza dismissed his account, observing that none of the other witnesses recalled seeing him on the stairs during the chaos.

“In closing the only open door that provided access to the gym, Combs’ personnel, who were well aware of the crowd uncontrollably rushing down the stairwell, created a barrier that squashed individuals together like ‘sardines,’ squeezing the life from young bodies,” Benza stated.

Combs’ legal representative in the City College case declined to comment. Heavy D, whose real name was Dwight Myers, passed away in 2011. No criminal prosecution was pursued.

While Deputy Mayor Milton Mollen criticized the crowd for “a lack of concern that has become characteristic of modern life and must be addressed before further lives are lost” in a report from 1992, Benza, in his ruling six years later, indicated that the crowd bore little blame.

“It doesn’t require great insight to understand that young individuals attending a rap concert deceptively labeled as a ‘celebrity basketball game,’ who have paid as much as $20 for admission, would likely be discontented and difficult to manage if they were unable to enter due to overselling,” he remarked.

Giving back

Although Combs experienced a setback in his career, he rebounded to become one of the leading producers and performers of the ’90s with Bad Boy Records, featuring artists like his close friend Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans.

As his career flourished, observers noted that Combs seemed to turn away from the families of the City College victims, according to Sonny Williams Jr., Sonya’s brother.

“He outright refused to assist me in preserving their memories,” Williams expressed.

In 1997, on the Grammy-winning album “No Way Out,” Combs mentioned the City College victims in his song “Pain,” while sidestepping accountability for their deaths.

To the deceased City College individuals, may you find peace

To their families, I never intended to inflict any pain

I possess the truth, but if you prefer, I’ll take the blame

On the other hand, Sonya Williams’ family established a small charitable organization called Sonya’s Seeds, which awarded scholarships to nursing students. According to her brother, Combs did not contribute.

However, after the murder of multi-platinum artist Notorious B.I.G. in November 1997, Sonny Williams Jr. was offered a chance to participate in another charitable initiative. An associate of Combs invited him to a fundraiser for the Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation, created in memory of the murdered rapper.

The cost: $1,000 per plate.