More victims identified as known death toll rises to 5 in Florida condo collapse

Police on Saturday night released the names of four victims of the condo collapse as a third day of searching drew to a close with grim news of another body found.

The victims are Stacie Dawn Fang, 54; Antonio Lozano, 83; Gladys Lozano, 79; and Manuel LaFont, 54, according to Miami-Dade police.

Fang’s family said in a statement that there are “no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie.” Fang’s 15-year-old son was pulled from the rubble in an early rescue and hospitalized without serious injuries.

Local news outlet WSVN reported that the Lozanos — family members of station meteorologist Phil Ferro — were set to celebrate their 59th wedding anniversary next month.

Posting a picture of the couple on Instagram, Ferro said the Lozanos were his godmother and uncle.

“They were such beautiful people,” he wrote.

SURFSIDE, Fla. — From her fourth-floor balcony, Cassondra Stratton felt a tremor and saw the swimming pool cave in. She immediately called her husband, Michael, in Denver, 2,000 miles away.

Michael listened as Cassondra, who had been riding out the pandemic at their apartment on the beach in Surfside, described a sudden shaking.

“And then the phone went dead,” he said.

“She screamed bloody murder and that was it,” Stratton’s sister, Ashley Dean, said.

It was after 1 a.m. Thursday, and the night owls at Champlain Towers South were up watching TV, relaxing on their terraces, chatting on the phone. A gentle tropical breeze swept in off the ocean. The sky was a hazy dark blue, a common sight on moonlit nights in South Florida, where the clouds and humidity accentuate the glow of city lights.

Then, a howling sound. Midway up the 12-story condo building, eerie orange flashes pierced the night.

As South Florida and the nation look for answers amid the ruins of Champlain Towers South, a federal response is on the way. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is dispatching six investigators to Surfside to investigate the cause of the collapse.

“We have a team assembling now, and their goal is to determine if we need to do a full investigation,” said Jennifer Huergo, a spokeswoman for NIST, a non-regulatory Department of Commerce agency that sifts through data to investigate large-scale structural collapses.

Investigators will look for what may have caused the condo collapse, focusing on factors that may have been detectable before the deadly incident, including structural failures in the building materials that are normally subject to review every 40 years under Miami-Dade County building codes.

Those could include standing water on the premises and visible cracks in the concrete in the structure. A 2018 report warned that such cracks were present in the building.

The NIST has investigated building collapses such as in the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attack, in a 2005 Rhode Island nightclub fire, and from a 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado.

“We want to do a preliminary reconnaissance, a fact-finding mission to see if we can make any recommendations,” said Jason Averill, an NIST division chief.

NIST said it would study the scene around crews searching for survivors.

“This work will not interfere with the ongoing search and rescue operation and our staff will only enter the site after it is deemed safe for them to do so,” it said in a statement.

Ana María Tous walked past a police barricade Saturday with a bag of groceries, a simple errand before this week that now meant leaving her car at her building two blocks from Champlain Towers South and, instead, walking.

Tous, 59, said she’s not too worried about the structural integrity of her building, given that it is 26 years old and was completed under stricter codes imposed after Hurricane Andrew tore through South Florida in 1992.

But the reports of rusting steel and cracked concrete pillars inside the collapsed tower has her wondering about the effects of the area’s continually rising tides.

Tous recalled how about 10 years ago she noticed water had mysteriously appeared in her building’s basement and she alerted the board, which addressed the problem.

A few years ago, the private beach next to her building had become badly eroded by the rising tides. The building’s board trucked in new sand to re-create the beach. Two weeks later, she said, the sand had again been swept away.

“I’m like: What is going on?” she said. “Why did the beach disappear? Something’s wrong.”

Coupled with that are the regular floods that come after heavy rains.

“Sometimes, you need a canoe,” Tous said. “The car cannot get through. There’s so much water that comes through so fast.”

Despite all that, she said, she’s not thinking about leaving her home any time soon.

For now, her main concern is dealing with the disruptions caused by the continuing rescue effort two blocks away, which includes walking everywhere in the punishing heat.

“This is not going away any time soon,” Tous said, about the ribbons of yellow police tape stretched across various points of Collins Avenue and the steady slow crawl of traffic on surrounding blocks.

“I think about it too much; that I’m locked in here,” she said. “I’d freak out.”

The known death toll from the collapse rose to five after crews recovered another body and detected human remains in the rubble of the 12-story high-rise, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a Saturday evening news conference.

Cava said 156 people remain unaccounted for after three bodies were identified — though officials are not releasing the victims’ names at this point, she said, out of respect to their families.

Despite the grim news as the search stretched into a third day, officials said they had not given up hope of finding more survivors. The priority, Cava said, is “saving any lives that we can.”

The mayor said search and rescue crews have made “some progress” against the fire and smoke that have hindered their efforts. “We were able to continue searching with fewer limitations,” Cava said.

“We’re searching the entire debris field,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan R. Cominsky said Saturday evening.

The mayor of Surfside, where the building collapsed, acknowledged calls from many frightened residents of Champlain Towers North, a “sister” tower up the street that he said is “basically the same building” as the ruined Champlain Towers South. The mayor, Charles Burkett, reiterated that he is not ordering evacuations of that structure.

Officials on Saturday did a “cursory review” of Champlain Towers North as well as Champlain Towers East, which is built in a different style. They did not find anything unusual, Burkett said.

After consulting with other leaders, Burkett said, the consensus was to give Champlain Towers North residents the option to relocate and work to examine the building closely, a “deep dive” that Burkett said would probably take a couple of weeks.

“Then we would know and we could probably say with certainty, or most likely, that the building is safe,” he said. “Because right now I can’t answer that question.”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency will help with arrangements for temporary moves, he said.

Naum Lusky, president of the condo association of Champlain Towers North, told The Washington Post that inspectors from Surfside and Miami-Dade County spent more than three hours in his building Saturday. He said some residents left voluntarily after the other condo collapsed.

“But they are coming back now that they know that everything is safe,” he said.

Burkett said at Saturday’s news conference that he read a 2018 report detailing significant problems with Champlain Towers South earlier that day. He was not mayor when the report was sent to Surfside.

Leon Roy Hausmann has tried to keep a singular focus while assisting a team of rescuers searching for signs of life amid a tangled heap of rubble.

The 43-year-old Aventura resident, a board member of the Jewish nonprofit rescue group Cadena International, has acquaintances who lived in Champaign Towers South — what he now refers to as “ground zero.” And some of the rescuers have even closer ties.

But as they used radar equipment to probe for breathing and signs of movement Thursday and Friday, the team attempted to keep their own feelings at bay.

“For me, my only focus now is for our team to find survivors,” Hausmann told The Washington Post. “There’s nothing else on our minds.”

He had just arrived at the condo site Saturday after an overnight search through the wreckage. It is a mountain of concrete slabs meshed with pieces of people’s homes, he said — couches, mangled balcony railings, glass windows and doors.

It’s uneven terrain, unstable and riddled with holes.

“You have steel going out, the rebars all over the place,” Hausmann said. “So it’s very treacherous.”

The seven Cadena rescuers, who joined the Miami-Dade Urban Search and Rescue team on-site Thursday afternoon, have battled through the building’s instability and small fires as they probe for survivors. And South Florida’s frequent summer storms have made unsteady ground slippery and harder to navigate.

Still, Cadena has scores of volunteers on-site.

“For us, it’s just a calling,” Hausmann said.

Their efforts have so far uncovered no survivors, and Hausmann said he was not aware of their equipment detecting any signs of movement. On Friday, they said a Jewish prayer to honor the dead.

“The last thing that we’re going to do is lose hope,” he said.

People formerly associated with the companies that had a role in the construction of Champlain Towers were unwilling Saturday to discuss the building.

One of the companies, Brieterman Jurado & Associates, Consulting Engineers, was mentioned in the 2018 engineer’s report as a consultant in the building’s construction. William M. Friedman & Associates Architects helped with the design.

At her home inside a gated community in Southwest Miami, Nelda Jurado — whose husband Manuel Jurado owned the consulting firm — declined to entertain any questions about water proofing or any other issues mentioned in the engineer’s report.

“That company no longer exists,” she said in Spanish into the intercom before hanging up.

Manuel Tapia-Ruano, a former vice president of the Friedman architectural firm, said the building’s design was handled by William Friedman, who died in 2018.

“It was his project, not mine,” Tapia-Ruano said about Friedman, also in Spanish, at his doorstep in another portion of Southwest Miami.

“When I joined the company, the building was already constructed,” Tapia-Ruano said. He had heard about the collapse but declined to discuss what might have caused it or how it might have been prevented.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.