Vanished in the night: A look at the people missing in the condo collapse near Miami Beach
They came here to share in the sea, in sand.
They came to retire. They came to work. They came to the Champlain Towers in Surfside to escape or to start anew. They came for healing — for vaccines or just to fish in the clear blue ocean. They came in from the cold winters up north. They came from the uncertainty of countries to our south. They came for a last, desperate chance.
More than 150 people who remain unaccounted for found themselves separate but together inside the Champlain Towers condominium in Surfside in the early hours of Thursday morning when the ground beneath them shook and the building collapsed.
They all had different reasons for being there that night. But their stories intersect with a thunderclap and a roar in the dark.
For some, to be able to live on Miami Beach was part of a perfect plan, a vision board that checked every box.
She left NYC to live her best life
Estelle Hedaya had never been this happy. She moved to South Florida in 2015 for a dream job with an international jewelry company and traveled the world, while posting to her food and travel blog. Fitness videos and photos from her travels brightened her friends’ Instagram feeds. Now in her 50s, their friend was living her best life.
She hosted a nightly Zoom happy hour with her friends during the pandemic, sitting on her balcony with the Atlantic Ocean shimmering in the background.
“If there was something fun to do, she was first in line. Just, that was her,” her close friend Mindy Beth Silverman said.
At one of the other condos, Juan Mora Jr., who graduated from Belen Jesuit Preparatory, took the opportunity to bolt from Chicago and escape to South Florida for a few weeks to visit his parents, Juan and Ana, who had retired to a condo at the Champlain.
Juan relished the moments to return to his hometown and catch up with high school buddies who became lifelong friends. And the ocean behind his parents’ condo was the perfect still life to paint new memories. He rounded up a pair of high school friends and fished in the sea, a few blocks from his parents’ condo the weekend before the building collapsed.
Miami was this couple’s adventure
Their time was now. Time for couples like Cassie Stratton, 40, and her husband, Mike, 66. This was their moment to enjoy life in South Florida. The couple had met seven years ago at a Super Bowl party, married two years later and made Surfside their part-time home. A model and Pilates instructor, Cassie was a New Orleans native who split her time between New York and the Surfside condo, where the couple had lived for four years. Their adventures took them around Miami, where they always found more to do than they had time.
“She was full of life, we were always doing something. There are so many interesting places to go in Miami and we took it all in,” Mike Stratton said.
Mike, a political strategist, was on a business trip to Washington when Cassie called him at 1:30 in the morning, frantic that the building had shook. She was on the phone with him when she looked out the window and saw a sinkhole where the swimming pool had been. Then the line went dead.
Leaving Paraguay for the first time
Not everyone who found themselves at the Champlain that night was in South Florida for a life of leisure.
Leidy Luna Villalba, 23, desperately needed to be here.
In Paraguay, her father was struggling to make ends meet at the farm where he worked, and she was running out of money to pay her way through nursing school.
So she begged her parents to let her fly to Miami to work as a nanny for the family of the sister of the first lady of Paraguay, who owned two condos in Champlain Towers. She had been working for them for more than a year, so her mother gave her blessing and Leidy gave her mother the longest hug and the kiss on the cheek. She sent her family a text saying she’d arrived safely late Wednesday night into Miami — hours before the building would collapse.
“She’s the primary breadwinner of our family and she went to Miami to work. She went for us. My heart is broken,” her mother Juana de Villalba told the Paraguayan press.
A quiet retirement
For some living in the Champlain, it was a time to slow down.
Couples like Arnold “Arnie” Notkin and his wife, Myriam Caspi Notkin, came to Surfside to slip gracefully into retirement. Arnie, a vibrant and energetic man, spent his career as a P.E. teacher, including at Feinberg Elementary in South Beach in the 1960s and ‘70s. He saw the best in children, detested bullies, encouraged “girl jocks” to be athletic “tomboys,” his students recalled decades later. He gave awards for “proficiency in stunts and tumbling.” He even taught one Junior Olympian.
Arnie, 87, and Myriam, 81, were known for attending social events in the Jewish-Cuban community that his wife was part of in nearby Miami Beach. But in the last few years, they spent more time at home in their condo. Arnie was having trouble walking. Myriam cared for him.
A working couple and their successful daughter
The Velasquezes — Julio, 67, and Angela, 60 — were living the best part of their retirement when their daughter, Theresa, flew in from Los Angeles Wednesday night.
The couple had rented out their house before moving to the condo. Julio was retired, but Angela remained active at Fiorelli, a men’s boutique she owns in Weston, near Fort Lauderdale.
Unit 304 was the place where the couple hoped to spend their golden years. Their daughter, Theresa, 36 — the spitting image of her young-looking mother — was carving out a successful career as a Live Nation entertainment executive. Her brother and his family were set to fly to Miami to await word from his loved ones.
They brought their daughter for vaccine
South Florida is a natural hub for Latin America and the Caribbean, which is why at least 36 people visiting from seven nations and Puerto Rico were among the missing.
The pandemic in Argentina had ground Andrés Galfrascoli’s work as a plastic surgeon to a near halt. So he and his partner, Fabian Nuñez, flew to Miami with daughter Sophia Nuñez to wait out the worst of the coronavirus outbreak at the condo of a Dania Beach friend, Rodrigo Salem. They had all planned on getting the COVID-19 vaccine, which has become scarce in Latin America.
A friend called Salem early Thursday morning to tell him about the collapse of the condo he had lent to his friends.
She wanted a fresh start
A condo on the South Florida sand was the perfect setting for someone looking to remake herself — someone like Linda March.
She was tired of New York’s Upper West Side, particularly during the pandemic. She had survived COVID-19 in 2020 and was determined to make 2021 better. So March, 58, rented the penthouse in Champlain Towers and left the cold Northeast behind.
The condo on the beach in South Florida signified a fresh start.
An attorney, she kept clients in New York and Miami and friends say she had found the perfect work-life balance for someone who liked to ride her pink bicycle down the Surfside boardwalk.
“The place was beautiful, oceanfront, with beautiful views,” her best friend since second grade, Rochelle Laufer, said. “The one thing she complained about was the construction.”
Not a condo, a home
The Champlain condo wasn’t a soulless vacation rental.
For the Kleimans, it was their permanent home — a gathering place for their Puerto Rican-Cuban family.
Jay Kleiman had flown from Puerto Rico to Miami to stay with his mother, Nancy Kress Levin, at her condo in the Champlain Towers. His brother Frankie and newlywed wife, Ana Ortiz, and her adult son, Luis, lived on the same floor.
South Florida was the place their family put down roots. Nancy Levin, 76, fled Fidel Castro’s government to Puerto Rico, where she and her husband, Saul, had two children. When the couple split, she brought the boys to South Florida, where they built a life — but kept close ties both to Miami’s Cuban-Jewish community and Puerto Rico’s Jewish community. Jay lived in Puerto Rico and visited his family often, always gathering at the beachside condo.
Frankie was a great stepdad to Ana’s son, who has muscular dystrophy, friends recalled. Jay, a musician, released an acoustic album in April— “All the Voices in My Head” — with lyrics that speak to love and being loved.
And they gathered here, at this condo, where Nancy took the photo that adorns her Facebook page: a golden sun rising over her balcony at the Champlain Towers.
Miami Herald writers Ariana Aspuru, Howard Cohen, Taylor Dolven, Samantha J. Gross, Asta Hemenway, Anna Kaiser, Connie Ogle, Syra Ortiz-Blanes, Bianca Padró Ocasio, Carli Teproff and Allie Pitchon contributed to this story.
This story was originally published June 26, 2021 at 7:11 PM.
