My Manager Died And Now The Owner Isn’t Paying Us.

So the day after Christmas my manager passed away after a long battle with cancer. I work at a small business (a salon) in Rhode Island. The owner and the manager have run the business together for 40+ years. They were very close so obviously when the manager passed we understood when the owner needed to take some time for himself. The problem is, our manager handled all the financials and now the owner is not! All of the stylists as well as our assistant manager have not been payed in 2-3 weeks. We are usually payed weekly and all of the stylists earn commission on a sliding scale, or hourly wage(whichever is higher that week).The assistant manager can do almost everything accept pay the bills and pay the employees. She has tried countless times to work it out with our owner so we all get payed but it is not happening! She calls him multiple times every day to no avail. One of our stylists who has been here for 20+ years has also been contacting him and he just won’t answer or if he does he gives weird excuses. He said his lawyer had to go to pro bono court or something but why would he have to do that for the manager dying, shouldn’t he have access to all the financials? We are all working on quitting and moving to new salon together hopefully, but what can we do about our paychecks? We are all struggling financially right now and he is ghosting us completely at this point!! Even when the stylist of 20+ years decided to pack up his stuff and quit today, the owner wouldn’t answer calls or texts informing him of this! After 20+ years together?!? The sympathy is gone for me and I want to peruse legal measures about my paychecks. What should I do?