Guara’s wife, moved to Miami from Cuba when she was 13. They lived in another condo in Surfside before moving to the Champlain Towers, where they had been renting an apartment for about four years. He met his wife at work about 20 years ago, and the couple was married in 2008 on St. He was a fan of the rock band Kiss and a die-hard supporter of the University of Miami Hurricanes - even teaching his daughters how to do the “U” hand sign. There he was, waving to her while kayaking across the water. Hurst ran into her brother while she was on a boat in one of Miami’s waterways. Guara’s childhood, she said, was filled with outdoor sports and competitive dirt biking. In a rare moment of levity, she described Mr. She and her brother Manuel were born in Cuba before coming to Miami, where their father was a professional jai alai player. Hurst had been a motherlike figure to Mr. She did not know at the time that his body had already been recovered. She wanted to believe in that moment that the dog had found her little brother and his family, that they were under the rubble but alive. Hurst watched as a search dog stopped in one area and began barking. There would be more visits to the reunification center, and more somber briefings in which Daniella Levine Cava, the mayor of Miami-Dade County, revealed the daily totals of the dead and the widening scale of the tragedy.Įventually, the families were escorted to what remained of the high-rise building, which had once soared 13 stories. “I was just focused on making sure I had hope from the beginning to whenever would be the end.” But there just wasn’t any information at that point. “There was a kind of desperation that you can’t even describe,” she said. She remembers the anxiety washing over her. Hurst and her family - her husband, Tom, her son, plus her other brother, Manuel, and his wife, Lola - eventually made their way to the reunification center, which was serving as a lifeline for relatives looking for information. Like many others who awoke to news of the collapse, Ms. In the early hours after the collapse, a stream of relatives, shellshocked, bewildered and confused - buildings do not just crumble, they said to one another, so how could this have happened - gathered near the ruins, where half the building was still standing. Four members of the family, Nancy Kress Levin, her two sons, Frank and Jay Kleiman, and Frank’s wife, Ana Ortiz, were memorialized on Thursday at a Hollywood, Fla., synagogue. Patel was four months pregnant.Īnd on the seventh floor, in Units 702 and 712, the Kleimans, who had lived in the building for many years. On the same floor, down the hall in Unit 311, were the Patels: Vishal, 42, his 38-year-old wife, Bhavna, their 1-year-old daughter, Aishani. Their daughter, Theresa, was visiting from Los Angeles. There was the Velasquez family in Unit 304, which included Angela, 60, who owned a men’s boutique, and her husband, Julio, 67. ![]() There was the Cattarrosi family in Unit 501, which included Graciela, a photographer, her daughter Stella, 7, her parents, Graciela and Gino, and her sister, Andrea, who was visiting from their home country of Argentina. Those families, plus many others, represent several dozen lives and at least three generations. Joseph Catholic Church, were among those killed in the structural collapse, among the deadliest in American history. Eight other families from his parish, St. Juan Sosa, who officiated the funeral for the Guara and Rodriguez family. “The Surfside community will never be the same again,” said the Rev. Gone in an instant were parents and their young or adult children, sets of siblings, married couples, grandparents and their grandchildren - leaving their survivors grief-stricken and their family trees with gaping holes. ![]() The time of the disaster - when much of America was asleep - left a particularly cruel legacy: the entire loss of family units. Seventy-six people were still classified as potentially missing. On Tuesday, the family - found beneath the heap of rubble just days after the Champlain Towers South partially collapsed on June 24 - was buried together, the girls sharing a coffin adorned with a pink ribbon and a purple ribbon.īy Thursday afternoon, the death toll had risen to 64, with 40 victims identified.
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