A woman who was heard pleading for help from the wreckage of the Champlain Towers South in the Miami suburb of Surfside has reportedly been identified.
Responders to the scene of the partial apartment collapse faintly heard the woman’s voice from within the rubble, but were unable to save her. She was one of 98 people who died in the collapse, which officials believe was primarily caused be the degredation of reinforced concrete support in the building’s basement parking garage. The cause of the collapse is still under investigation.
Now, nearly a year later, a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue report has identified the woman as 36-year-old Theresa Velasquez — a California-based music executive who was in Florida visiting her parents. Those parents, Julio and Angela, also died in the collapse.
According to Miami Dade Deputy Fire Chief Ray Jadallah, the author of the report, the identification of Velasquez was based on more than two months of interviews with the crews that attempted to extricate her from the rubble. Jedallah has also been in touch with members of Ms Velsaquez’s familly.
Responders agreed that the voice was female, but were intially divided on whether the voice identified herself as staying in Unit 204, where Valeria Barth was staying with her parents, or Unit 304, where Ms Velsaquez was staying with her parents. Ultimately, Jedallah wrote, the evidence pointed to Velsaquez. Responders said that the voice sounded like an native English speaker’s, which Ms Velasquez was and Ms Barth is not.
“One rescuer stated that when they asked the victim if she was with someone else, the female voice responded she was visiting her parents (paraphrased),” the report states. “This statement correlates with the accounts from Theresa Velasquez’s family stating that Ms. Velasquez was visiting her parents from California and was staying with them in apartment #304.”
In an interview with CBS Miami, David Velasquez, Theresa’s brother, accepted the report’s finding.
“There is no way to know 100 per cent,” he said. “but it seems like the logical conclusion.”
The complex partially collapsed on 24 June of last year. Ms Velasquez’s body was not recovered until 8 July. It wasn’t unitl 26 July that the final missing person was identified, bringing the death toll up to 98.
The collapse is the joint third-most deadly structural engineering failure in US history. Just last week, the families of the victims of the collapse reached a $997 million settlement with companies who had worked on the structure. It has not yet been determinted how that money will be split up.
