The June 24 disaster killed a vertical neighborhood of people connected to each other, 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. More: Death toll at Surfside collapsed condo site reaches 94 Photos: Items of Remembrance: The Surfside Memorial Wall More: Joseph Zevuloni, founder of Strong For Surfside talks about what will stick with him most. 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,80-year-old Cuban-born man who spoke five languages, lived alone in a penthouse apartment and was known affectionately as “Simoncito.” Seven stories below, in Unit 503, three generations of the Cattarossi family lived and died that night. From 7-year-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. 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. More: Remembering those who died in the Champlain Towers condo collapse in Surfside 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 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.
