Jon Williams
was known to help others down on their luck, but that kindness ultimately cost him his life, those who knew him say.
MIAMI — They had just finished up lunch, and set off to run an errand: a drive to the travel agency to pick up airline tickets for their annual visit to their homeland, Cuba.
Osvaldo Gonzalez and Alberto Arias, friends and business partners, happened to pass under a Miami bridge that Thursday afternoon, the road bustling with fellow drivers also out on the most ordinary and unthreatening of life's tasks.
A teenager was driving her friend to the doctor’s office to pick up some medicine. A father of three was heading home from work. A woman on her way to a nail salon was stopped at a red light. Seconds, inches would separate those who would live from those who wouldn’t.
Sweetwater Police Detective Juan Llera was at his office a few blocks away, when he heard what he thought was a bomb exploding.
It was not a bomb; it was a bridge. But in an instant, this 950-ton span under construction at Florida International University collapsed, and with no time to act or to flee, the cars that were below it were pancaked under the rubble. Six people died.
“Imagine,” said Amauri Naranjo, who’s known Gonzalez since before he left Cuba in the 1980s, “a long-
time friendship that survives even with the sea between us, and it ends because of something like that.”
Gonzalez and Arias, who owned a party rental and decoration business, were among the six dead. Their bodies were found Saturday inside their white Chevy truck as rescuers for days dug through the wreckage of the fallen bridge at Florida International University. Hope for a miracle rescue faded as the names of the six dead became known, and those left living grappled with the senselessness. Others were saved by seconds. Dania Garlobo was driving to work at a nail salon when the green
light changed to yellow and a man in a white Mercedes tried to make it through the light, but stomped on the brakes as the bridge fell in front of him. “He was almost caught underneath.” Garlobo said.
Llera had sped to the scene and arrived within minutes. In the mayhem, he found a man unconscious on the street and performed CPR. He could barely feel a pulse, but someone with the university medical staff came by and said, “you are keeping him alive. Keep going.” So he did, and the man was alive when they rushed him away.
Llera checked in at the hospital but could get no information. He thought the man lived.
But on Sunday morning, he studied a picture on the news of a young man in a crisp red shirt.
He has been identified by police
as Navarro Brown, 37, an employee with Structural Technologies VSL, listed among those killed. He died at the hospital.
Victim Brandon Brownfield and his wife, Chelsea, had three young daughters. The family moved to Florida several years ago for his job at Maxim Crane Works, according to a fundraising page a friend started for the family. He was driving home from work when the bridge collapsed.
“I now have to find the words and the answers to tell my girls that their Daddy is not coming home,” his wife wrote on Facebook.
Inside one car there, one teenager was killed and one walked away with minor injuries — a fate decided by which seat they happened to be sitting in.
Richie Humble, 19, a student,
had not been feeling well earlier in the week. On Thursday, a friend, Alexa Duran, 18, the nicest person he said he ever knew, gave him a ride to his doctor’s office to pick up some medication. They stopped at a red light, under the bridge.
“I looked up, and in an instant, the bridge was collapsing on us completely,” Humble said.
Once he realized he was alive, he also realized he couldn’t get to Duran. As he called out for her, getting no response, a group of men outside the car started yelling at him to try crawling out of the car. They pried open the door to free him.
He sat on a curb as rescue workers checked him out. He remembers asking, “What do I do?”
“Everyone has to pick up the pieces,” he said the rescuer responded. “Life doesn’t stop.”