Portraits of some of the missing and the lost,
Vishal and Bhavna Patel, 42 and 38 respectively, had just recently moved to Miami from New York with their 1year-old daughter, Aishani. They chose Champlain Towers South for its beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean and its proximity to the beach. Bhavna, a dual British and U.S. citizen, was four months pregnant, and the couple thought the building would be an idyllic place to raise two young children. Now, the young family is among those missing after the horrific condo collapse.
Silvia Lugo, a photographer in Pembroke
Pines, had shot family portraits for the Patels on two different occasions. The first was for Aishani’s birth, and the second for her first birthday, which was only a few weeks ago. The couple was planning to hire Lugo in a few months to photograph their second child as a newborn, too.
The couple was overjoyed with their little girl, Lugo said, and they wanted to document all the important milestones of her life. By the second photo shoot, Lugo said, Aishani had just began to grow her first set of bottom teeth.
“I work with a lot of couples,” Lugo told the Herald. “And when you talk about a couple being one, they were one. They were amazing to one another and they loved their daughter enormously. All we can do is keep hoping for a miracle.”
Vishal’s sister, Pooja Patel, flew into Miami soon after the collapse to wait for any news about the family. She told the Herald that all three members of the small family are “beautiful people,” and that they have not given up hope.
The temple that the young family attended, Shri Mariamman Temple in Opa-locka, is grieving too. The temple was a second home to them, friends of the couple told Sky News. Everyone who knew them loved them, and the entire temple is in shock.
““They are more than family to me, they are loved ones, more than family, because they lived in this temple for a long time,” Priest Rishi Goolcharran, who was a close friend of the couple, told the outlet. “I still cannot believe that they would leave us, but we just have to have a very strong bond of the memory of what they actually were to us.”
The couple’s longtime friend, Vishal Abash, was also devastated about their loss. He described the couple to Sky News as sweet, loving people, adding that he’d never heard Bhavna say a bad word about anyone since the day he met her.
“They were angels,” he said. “And now maybe God has come to reclaim his angels.”