The FIU bridge crushed their daughter. Her iphone survived – but they can’t unlock it

Family seeks to find closure in wake of teen’s death

MIAMI – Tucked away inside a white, weathered dresser rests a brown, crumpled paper bag.

Inside that bag are a few ounces of what’s left of the dead teen – two wrinkled dollar bills, a quarter, a dusty hair tie, a black leather choker, a long pendant necklace, a silver ring, a sorority keychain, a Sunpass transponder and a driver’s license.

“This is what they handed to me,” whispered Gina Duran, angry tears dribbling down her cheek.

The mourning mother held the chalky items up into the light. Her voice cracked.

“They handed me my daughter in a freaking paper bag.”

Alexa Duran, 18, was one of six people crushed to death on March 15 when the pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed onto ongoing traffic. The FIU freshman would have turned 19 last week.

The mountain of concrete crushed cars, even the strongest of pickup trucks, at 1:47 p.m. that day. Alexa, who was driving her father’s Toyota 4Runner, was going east on Tamiami Trail and was on her way to drop off a dear friend at home.

In an instant, the bridge – which was still under construction – caved, mangling the SUV. Footage shows a yellow school bus halting just moments before the disaster. Dozens climbed out of their cars and dashed toward the rubble as dust and crumbled concrete drifted through the air.

An immense slab fell diagonally, almost precisely, onto the driver’s side of Alexa’s vehicle. The passenger, FIU student Richard Humble, was spared.

“It was as if God chose my daughter that day,” Gina said.

As the public waits for answers on what happened – at the same time government agencies are stanching the flow of vital information – the Duran family is busy fighting to preserve her memory with one other salvaged possession: Alexa’s unscathed iphone.

“My daughter’s body came back as flat and thin During a May 18 Mass to celebrate what would have been Alexa M. Duran’s 19th birthday, friends and extended family joined the immediate family at St. Mark Catholic Church in Southwest Ranches, Fla.

as a cracker but her iphone survived without a single scratch,” Gina Duran said.

The family’s quest to live out their daughter’s last days and find closure in the wake of the teen’s death hasn’t come without major obstacles – specifically Alexa’s password, which was her thumbprint.

As a backup, Alexa armed her cell with a six-digit pin code. About a dozen friends and family members have tried to guess it and had no success.

As a last resort, relatives

have attempted to figure out her Apple ID password.

Could it be her dog’s name, Lola? No. Her favorite food? No. How about her birthday or boy crush? No.

After the maximum number of failed attempts, the phone locked itself.

Her older sister, Dina, said, “Alexa set the password to have the maximum number of characters allowed,” making it that much harder to crack.

To no avail, the grieving family even tried local independent

technology companies. They could not hack into it.

Apple requires a court order, a death certificate and proof of them being trustee of Alexa’s estate – an exhausting process the Duran family is currently navigating.

Apple has no way to unlock phones because it doesn’t store pass codes, thumbprint or face recognition data, according to the company. However, with a court order, it can access whatever the user uploaded to his or her icloud.