The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Loved ones mourn 4 who died in collapse
SURFSIDE, FLA. — Authorities have identified four of the nine people confirmed to have died after the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium in Florida. About 150 others remained missing Sunday as rescuers painstakingly searched through the rubble of the Champlain Towers South. The Miamidade Police Department said the dead include Stacie Dawn Fang, Manuel Lafont and Antonio and Gladys Lozano.
STACIE DAWN FANG
Fang, 54, was with her son Jonah Handler, a teenager, when the building collapsed. They lived on the 10th floor. The boy’s small hand waved through the wreckage as a man out walking his dog hurried to the site, climbed through a pile of glass and rebar and promised to get help.
Rescuers helped the boy out from under a pile of concrete and carried him away on a stretcher to a hospital.
“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie,” members of her family said in a statement. “Many heartfelt words of encouragement and love have served as a much needed source of strength during this devastating time.”
Asked about the boy’s condition, family friend Lisa Mozloom told the AP: “He will be fine. He’s a miracle.”
ANTONIO AND GLADYS LOZANO
The couple lived on the ninth floor. They had known each other for more than 60 years and would have celebrated their 59th wedding anniversary on July 21.
Their sons told WPLG-TV that the couple had joked that neither wanted to die before the other, because neither wanted to live without the other. The sons said their only solace was that their parents were together when they died.
Authorities confirmed Saturday that Antonio, 83, and Gladys, 79, were among the dead.
Sergio Lozano said he had dinner with his parents hours before the collapse. He lived in one of the towers of the complex and could see his parents’ apartment across the way. That night, he said he heard a loud noise he thought could be a storm.
“The building is not there,” he said he told his wife. “My parents’ apartment is not there. It’s gone.”
MANUEL LAFONT
Lafont, 54, was a proud father, a baseball fan and a business consultant who lived on the building’s eighth floor. He had a 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter with ex-wife Adriana Lafont, the Miami Herald reported.
Adriana asked her friends on Facebook to pray the rosary for Manny before his body was found. “So many memories inside the walls that are no more today, forever engraved experiences in the heart,” she wrote.
Lafont, a Houston native, coached his son’s baseball team, the Astros, at North Shore Park, just a mile away from the Champlain. He was a parishioner at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Miami Beach. The parish’s school parents gathered Saturday afternoon to pray for Lafont and his neighbors who were still missing.
An alumnus of Sharpstown High School in Houston, Lafont had worked across Latin America and the Caribbean for a manufacturing firm, leading a division focusing on roadway safety that built crash cushions and movable barriers, the Herald reported.
“I got into this industry specifically because I don’t want to sell widgets. I want to help people. I want to do something good in this world,” he said at an industry conference in 2016. “When I die, I want to say that my life meant something.”