‘VOICE IN RUBBLE’
Tragic Fla. condo vic was music exec: report
The woman whose voice was heard in the rubble of the horrific condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., has been identified as a 36-yearold entertainment industry exec from Los Angeles, authorities said.
Theresa Velasquez was heard calling out after the initial collapse of the Champlain Towers on June 24, 2021, but rescuers couldn’t reach her before she died, according to an 11-page MiamiDade Fire Rescue memo obtained by CBS Miami.
Her body was recovered on July 8. Velasquez had just flown into Miami from LAX the night of the collapse to visit her parents, Julio, 67, and Angela, 60, who also died.
Her brother, David, said he accepts the findings of the probe into the so-called “voice in the rubble.”
“There is no way to know 100% but it seems like the logical conclusion,” he told the news outlet.
The memo, written by Deputy Fire Chief Raied Jadallah, refutes a December 2021 report by The Palm Beach Post and USA Today that identified the victim as Valeria Barth, 14, who had been visiting Miami with her parents from Colombia to get COVID-19 shots.
“According to rescuers, the voice was that of a grown woman whose English appeared to be that of an English speaker with native sentence syntax and excellent vocabulary,” the report says.
During a press conference on July 1, 2021, Fire Chief Alan Cominsky said rescuers heard “audible sounds” from a woman during their initial search.
“She was asking for help and she was pleading to be taken out of there,” a first responder told WPLG at the time.
Velasquez, who worked for the music event company Live Nation in Los Angeles for six years, began her music career in 2004, deejaying in clubs around Miami under the name DJ Theresa, the Miami Herald reported.
Her older brother, David, remembered her as “effortlessly cool.”
“A planet with her own gravity where people got caught in her orbit,” he said, according to the Herald. “She could do everything well, an absolute force of nature.”