Try not to assume I like people getting stabbed, or that I think anything other than the fact that the people who were stabbed are suffering the most.
From my connections I can verify that since it was the day after Christmas much of their senior staff- the people who would have been able to handle this better- were still out of town for the holidays. That's also why they were operating with a skeleton crew. Well, that and they always paid bottom dollar for security, which is also how you wind up with the actions of two members of their detail that night. Who made the call for things like that? Corporate. It is a national chain you know, and a lot of the local employees never had a say in how things were done if it came down to the numbers on the spreadsheet. As for mopping up the blood, that was simply a case of a Spanish-speaking barback who would jump on a mess instantly without thinking it through. There were a lot of really good decent people who worked there, (and disclaimer, I am friends with some of them) but it's completely unfair to group all of the employees together and paint them as bad people. Some worked there to help pay for school. Some worked there because the money was good. Most of them were nothing like the clientele they serviced.
Could they have gotten jobs elsewhere? Some could have. Others could not. There are many complaints to be made about how this business was run, but one of the areas they excelled in was promoting from within. Bouncers could become barbacks who could work their way up to servers in the hopes of one day getting trained to bartend. That developed loyalty, and the fact that they were always always busy meant that they didn't have to worry about making rent like a bartender can at smaller bars, when a slow shift could mean you spend more in transportation getting to your shift than you make during it.
As for the multiple violations in the past? Yes. Plenty of public intox, plenty of petty fights (pushing and shoving, maybe some fists), plenty of underage drinking. Those all come with the territory for any bar in America who explicitly caters to a college crowd.
This was the first seriously violent incident of its kind.
Yes, it was a trough. It was a stinky, dirty, hole where barely 21s learned (painfully slowly) about going out in the city, and they played the music too loud, and the DJ talked over it and they would never stop texting you once they had your number. All of that is true.
I'm not asking anyone to think better of the place. I'm just asking for us to end this narrative that "the staff helped the guy", "they tried to cover up the crime scene", and "they got what they deserved". No. Two people did this, and they were able to do this because decisions about how to run the place were being made from hundreds of miles away.