ALL THE SOULS LOST AT CHAMPLAIN TOWERS SOUTH
June 24 disaster killed a vertical neighborhood of people connected to one another, South Florida and beyond. Those left behind tell their stories.
When the walls of Champlain Towers South started tumbling, they brought down 12 stories of building materials, and within them, many more stories of decent lives so indecently ended.
Each one a tragedy in its own way. Kids as young as Emma Guara, age 4. Grandmothers as old as Hilda Noriega, age 92. Couples like Antonio and Gladys Lozano, who were one month shy of celebrating their 59th wedding anniversary, and couples like Frankie and Annie Kleiman, who had been married for less than a month.
Brilliant young college students eager to start their careers. Recent retirees eager to enjoy their golden years. And asleep behind every door, somebody’s cherished “abuela,” parent, husband, wife, sister, brother, cousin, nephew, niece, godfather, grandchild or friend.
And to make matters worse, there would also be those just passing through, like the supremely unlucky Francis Fernandez Plascencia, 67, a mother of three. On the night of the building collapse, she went with her friend, Maggie Vazquez-bello, to the “Beyond Van Gogh” art exhibit at the Ice Palace Studio in Miami.
Rather than drive to her home in South Miami, Plascencia decided to spend the night at her friend’s Surfside condo in Champlain Towers South, a casual decision that proved fatal.
Demise of a vertical neighborhood
This was a building of close-knit, international families, where English, Spanish and Hebrew flowed interchangeably. It was a vertical neighborhood, where Simon Segal, a short, 80year-old Cuban-born man who spoke five languages, lived alone in a penthouse apartment above it all, and was known affectionately as “Simoncito.”
Seven stories below, in Unit 503, three generations of the Cattarossi family lived and died that night. From 7year-old Stella to her 47-year-old mother, Graciella, who shared her bed, to the grandparents in the next room, Graciella, 86, and Gino, 89. And as fate would have it, they were being visited that night by the mother’s sister, Andrea, who would also die, breaking the hearts of three sons of her own back in Argentina.
Stella’s father, a Miami-dade firefighter, would be working the pancaked pile of the broken building days later when his 7-year-old daughter’s remains were found.
These are snippets of unthinkable sadness that the rest of the world has been learning during the past month, as grieving family members cope with their losses and tell the stories of their loved ones.
Remembering those lost
Ingrid “Itty” Ainsworth, 66, was a bit of a character, her family and friends report.
“She surpasses the saying, ‘Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses,’ ” Itty’s daughter, Chana Wasserman, wrote in a blog post last year. “My mother sees the world through rainbow-colored glasses with unicorns and dolphins diving in and out.”
Itty and her husband, Tzvi, 68, (nicknamed “Tzvi the Tzaddik”) died in the collapse. The woman’s close friend, Sori Block, said Itty lived her life more deeply than anyone else she knew.
“Itty gave something that is a rare commodity today: time,” Block wrote in a Chabad website. “In a world where we are constantly rushing and running, her world was an oasis of calm and charm, wit and wisdom, seashells and sunset – family, friends and fantastic conversations. She invigorated, intoxicated, energized and pacified you with her presence.”
The building collapse took down the bedroom where Itty and her husband were sleeping, but left intact a portion of their unit just a few feet away.
“If they would have been in the kitchen, they would have been fine,” said their son, Dovy.
So many lives were still in progress, waiting to bloom for the first time, or to bloom again.
A dog named ‘Chance’
Take the Epsteins, for example, who had been living in Unit 901 for the past 16 years.
David, 58, and Bonnie, 56, were married for 31 years and enjoying an early retirement in their oceanside condo.
David Epstein, a Wharton business school graduate, had a career as a real estate investor. But what he really wanted to do was put work behind him and spend more time at the beach, kite boarding, scuba diving and snorkeling with his wife.
A couple days before the building collapsed, the husband had a conversation with his former business partner, Richard Oller.
“As I talked business, David countered with how much he and his wife Bonnie loved their early retirement,” Oller wrote in a memorial post. “Through my deep sadness, my only comfort is knowing that on Wednesday, David was the happiest man I know, and he and Bonnie are still together.”
In a cruel twist of fate, Epstein’s friend wrote that the couple wasn’t even supposed to be in the condo that night. They had made plans to drive their Tesla north to spend most of their summer in New York visiting their only child, Jonathan, 26, in Brooklyn.
But the dog they pet-sat, and ended up adopting when its owner failed to claim it, was sick. So they stayed in their Surfside condo for a few more days to take care of the dog before leaving to visit their son.
“They were anxious to head north a few weeks ago to see him, but the dog wasn’t feeling so well, so they waited,” Oller wrote.
The dog’s name: Chance.
No good deed would go unpunished that night at Champlain Towers South.
Gary Cohen, 59, was spending the night in an 11th-floor condo unit with his brother, Brad, 51, during a trip to see his ailing father, who had a terminal illness.
Gary Cohen was a doctor who specialized in rehabilitation at the VA Medical Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala. His brother, Brad Cohen, was an orthopedic surgeon with a sports-medicine practice in North Miami Beach.
Gary Cohen’s body was recovered quickly, but his brother’s body remained missing for weeks, even though rescuers found his ring.
The agony of missing loved ones
The sight of Brad Cohen’s 12-year-old daughter, Elishiva, praying alone by the site days after the collapse captivated and haunted Surfside’s Mayor Charles Burkett.
“When I came across her, she was sitting in a chair by herself, nobody around her, looking at her phone,” Burkett said during a news conference four days after the collapse. “And I knelt down and asked her, ‘So what are you doing?’
“She was reading a Jewish prayer to herself, sitting at the site where one of her parents presumably is,” the mayor continued. “And that really brought it home to me. She wasn’t crying. She was just lost. She didn’t know what to do. Who to talk to.”
Burkett, who later arranged for the girl to meet President Joe Biden during his trip to Surfside, said that he couldn’t stop thinking of her.
“I am going to find her, and I am going to tell her that we’re all here for her and we are going to do the best we can to bring out that parent,” the mayor said.
Because this was in South Florida, the land of fresh starts, the building collapse claimed victims who were there looking forward to new directions in their lives.
They included Harold Rosenberg, 52, who moved from New York to Florida a year ago following the death of his wife, Ana, of brain cancer. Rosenberg had quit his job in New York’s financial industry and planned to create a mentalhealth treatment facility in Israel, a project his wife had begun before she died.
But misery would follow him, first with the deaths of both of his parents from COVID-19, and then with the collapse of his new Florida home at Champlain Towers South.
And there to die with him that night were his 27-year-old daughter, Malky Weitz, and her husband, Benny, 32, who had arrived just days before to pay him a visit from Lakewood, New Jersey.
At first, families clung to hope that somehow their missing loved ones would emerge from the mountain of pancaked rubble or be found still alive.
The 19-year-old little sister of Andreas Giannitsopolous, 21, was sure that if anybody could survive this, it would be her decathlon-athlete big brother, who was an incoming senior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The college student was inside the Surfside condo that night because he decided to stay longer than his mother during a trip to see his godfather, Manuel “Manny” Lafont, 54.
Manny, the life of the party
Lafont, who lived on the eighth floor of the building, was remembered with laughter as well as tears at his memorial service. He was, by all accounts, a lover of good food, dancing, and sports – and a people magnet. He had discovered the existence of his brother, Ray, a little more than nine years ago.
“He said, ‘I don’t need a DNA test,’ ” Ray Perez said at Lafont’s memorial service. “‘We are brothers.’ ”
Some of the best times they shared, Ray said, were those sitting on the balcony of Lafont’s condo being “true to one another.”
“He loved those that were dear to him, and he loved them hard,” his belatedly connected brother said. “Those that he really loved, he gave his heart to, and he gave his heart to me.”
Lafont’s two children, Mia, 13, and Santi, 10, were in his Champlain Towers South condo that night. But in a blessing of good fate, his ex-wife, Adriana Lafont, picked up the children to bring them home with her a few hours before the building collapsed.
In those early days after the collapse, the ex-wife agonized over the loss of her former husband and her children’s father, praying for a miracle that he would still be alive.
“So many memories inside the walls that are no more today, forever engraved experiences in the heart!” she wrote on Facebook.
“My Manny, who was my partner for so many years, father of my children, who scolds me and loves me at the same time.
“‘Adriana, be on time!!’ ‘Adriana, don’t change the plans!!’ Adrianna, Adriana ...
“Follow the hopes, my children are clinging to the miracle of life,” she continued. “Manny, Daddy, we want to hug you again to tell you how much we love you.”
The cruelty of it all.
Lives of promise ended too soon
Ilan Naibrf and his girlfriend, Deborah Berezdivin, were quite a couple. They were both 21 years old and seemed destined for great things.
He was an incoming senior at the University of Chicago, where he majored in physics. He had already started a company that created a stock-currency payment platform that allows users to sell fractional shares of stock.
She was raised in Puerto Rico and was an incoming junior at George Washington University.
“Deborah is the type of person that would do anything for her loved ones and will always tell you what is right,” the GW Hillel Instagram page posted after her death. “She is passionate about many things including her family and friends and also shares a huge love for sushi, fashion, and her favorite show ‘Sex and the City.’ ”
Ilan and Deborah met at Camp Judea and maintained a long-distance relationship.
His family lives in Weston, in Broward County. But on the night they died together, they decided to spend the night at her family’s condo in Champlain Towers South because it was closer to a funeral they were both planning to attend the next day.
The last image of the couple was snapped as a selfie on Deborah’s cellphone and sent to her boyfriend’s mother at 10:36 p.m., a little less than three hours before the building crumbled.
In the photo, the two of them are posing inside an elevator car at the condo. Behind them, the red-light display shows they are on the lobby floor with a red arrow pointing up.
That same funeral scheduled for the next day – for a person who had died from COVID-19 – had drawn other people to the Champlain Towers that night.
A songwriter with more to say
Jay Kleiman, who lived in Puerto Rico, traveled to Surfside for the funeral and was spending the night at the seventh-floor Champlain Towers South condo owned by his mother, Nancy Kress Levin.
Kleiman ran his own women’s apparel design and merchandising business in Puerto Rico when he wasn’t writing songs and producing albums.
He had just completed his third album in April, and was happy with the result and looking ahead.
“These songs are truly me,” he wrote about his new music. “They are an open book into who I am. There are more songs coming, I am not done saying what I want to say.”
But he would die. And so would his mother, and in another apartment down the hall, his brother, Frank, 55, his newlywed wife, Ana, and her son, Luis Bermudez, 26, who had spent his life coping with muscular dystrophy.
Building of international intrigue
There were no household names among the victims of Champlain Towers South, but the building was full of interesting people who had lived and experienced interesting lives.
Graciella Cattarossi, 86, was a former United Nations diplomat from Uruguay.
Juan Mora Sr., 80, was a radio operator during the 1961 Cia-funded Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He was captured during the ill-fated assault and imprisoned in Cuba for 20 months, The Associated Press reported.
Philippines-born Maricoy “Maria” Bonnefoy, 69, had served as a senior budget officer at the International Monetary Fund, while her husband, Claudio, 85, who also died in the collapse, was the uncle of Michelle Bachelet, the first woman to be elected as president of Chile, and the current United Nations high commissioner for human rights.
The timing of the collapse in the wee hours of the morning meant that the building’s residents would be there, but unlikely to be awake to save themselves.
The lucky among the damned
Iliana Monteagudo in Unit 611 was the rare resident who got an inkling of what was going on, and fled the building before it collapsed on her.
Monteagudo had lived in the area for a long time, but just moved into Champlain Towers South six months ago.
“She’s wanted to live in that building ever since she moved to Miami 40 years ago,” her son, Andy Alvarez, told Chris Cuomo on CNN. “She dreamed of living there. She would tell her friends for many years that one day she would live in that building.”
In her last night in the building, Monteagudo recounted waking up from her sleep after hearing noises, and then finding the ceiling of her unit starting to crack.
She grabbed her purse, credit cards, medications, and cellphone, then blew out the votive candle she had lit for Our Lady of Guadalupe, before running for the elevator, she told Cuomo.
She was the rare person who was able to save herself, but not the only person who was awake.
Cassondra Stratton, 40, a model and pilates instructor, was awake in Unit 402. Stratton and her husband Michael, 66, a Democratic political strategist based in Colorado, had bought a unit there four years ago.
“We’ve made the big move to Miami, and I can’t tell you how happy I am here!” Stratton wrote in her blog, Chic 365. “It’s like a slice of heaven. My own little piece of serenity. To wake up every morning and stare out into the vast blue turquoise sea. It truly is pure bliss!”
Stratton’s husband was in Denver on the night of the collapse, and she talked to him moments before the collapse while standing on her balcony and describing the horror of seeing the condo’s swimming pool deck turn into a sinkhole, news outlets reported. Then there was a scream and the line went dead.
Cassondra Stratton was later identified among the deceased.
The first person to be pulled alive from the building’s partial collapse was Jonah Handler, 15, a high school sophomore who lived with his mother, Stacie Dawn Fang, 54, on the 10th floor.
After the collapse, the boy ended up under his mattress and bed frame, partially buried in the rubble, but somehow still alive after the multistory fall that killed his mother.
Nicholas Balboa, an area resident who happened to be walking his dog when the building collapsed, went over to the pile of concrete and metal and saw the boy’s fingers emerge from a gap in the rubble.
“Can somebody see me?” the partially buried teenager called out.
Balboa reassured the boy that help was on the way.
“Please don’t leave me,” the boy kept saying, Balboa later recounted.
Two family members living in Unit 904 were also rescued after tumbling four stories in the wreckage. Angela Gonzalez and her 16-year-old daughter, Deven, were rescued alive and transported to the hospital for treatment.
“Both Deven and Angela have suffered multiple injuries and are currently recovering. Taylor, Deven’s older sister, was not in the building at the time of the collapse and has been by their side,” the family’s Gofundme page says.
Edgar Gonzalez, the husband of Angela and father of the two girls, remained missing, while two weeks after the building collapsed, the family’s black cat, Binx, was found unscathed, foraging near the site of destruction.
The early rescues of a few building residents gave other family members hope that their loved ones would also be found alive.
Hanging on for hopes
One of the hopefuls was Carlos Noriega, the police chief of the nearby North Bay Village. Noriega’s 92-year-old mother, Hilda, was in the part of the sixth floor that collapsed.
When dawn revealed the scene of destruction, the chief and his son, Mike Noriega, searched for a sign of their beloved mother or grandmother amid the 30-foot pile of rubble.
In what seemed miraculous at the time, the chief found a card inside an envelope with his mother’s first name, Hilda, on it. In the middle of all that debris, a birthday card signed by his mother’s friends on her recent birthday turned up.
And then the chief found an old photo of a young Hilda with the police chief ’s father and the chief when he was just a boy.
“It filled us with hope,” Mike Noriega told local TV news.
But as days turned to weeks, hope turned to dread and finality.
Coming to terms with loss
Stephanie Mcmanus is coping with the loss of her mother, Elaine Sabino, 71, a Jetblue flight attendant who lived in a penthouse unit in the condo.
“I am so sad for the lost opportunities with her,” Mcmanus wrote. “We were going to travel one day and be closer. I wanted us to be ‘friends’ as we got older, not only a mother and a daughter.
“And, it hurts so much that all of the possibility for a future with her is gone. But talking about how ‘big’ she tried to live her life helps a little and reminds me that we should all focus on living well even when it is hard.”
Paul George, a Miami historian who leads walking tours of Surfside, said the collapse will likely be a historical event for South Florida in the same league as its two main natural disasters: the unnamed hurricane of 1928 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
“This is our first human-made disaster,” George said. “Some people will leave condominiums, but America tends to heal itself. And so it will move forward with some improved safety measures.”
As for the condo’s property, a judge has already cleared it for sale. But there’s no going back there, George said.
“The only logical thing to do is to make a memorial site out of it,” George said. “It seems that’s the way it’s got to go.”