Nearly 4 years after FIU bridge fell, a family who lost their daughter finds acceptance
As soon as she goes into her daughter’s room, Gina Duran beelines to the closet.
She swipes through the clothing until she finds Alexa’s favorite shirt: a blue-and-white plaid blouse, the one that Duran rescued from the dirty laundry bin shortly after her daughter died.
Hugging it to her face, she squeezes the shirt, closes her eyes and sighs: “Yes, it still smells like her.”
It was nearly four years ago, a Thursday afternoon on March 15, 2018, when the under-construction pedestrian bridge that Florida International University championed to carry students over busy Tamiami Trail collapsed, killing six people, including Gina and Orlando Duran’s 18-year-old daughter, Alexa, an FIU freshman.
For days, weeks and months after the tragedy, Gina clung to that shirt, slipping into her daughter’s bed, sobbing.
Grief paralyzed her from dismantling her youngest daughter’s room, which remains as is, down to the pink piggy bank on her nightstand and the corkboard over her bed, complete with the gray-and-green varsity letters she earned from cheerleading and dance at Archbishop McCarthy High School.
Grief caused her to panic every time she heard an ambulance siren. Her legs itched, her hands clutched the steering wheel and she resisted the urge to follow it.
And grief threatened to end the Durans’ 29-year-old marriage, the death of a child too much to bear. But they found comfort in going to the cemetery together, carefully selecting fresh flowers from their neighborhood Publix to place by their daughter’s tomb, talking to her, telling her about their week.
The Durans have another daughter, Dina, who was a few years older than her sister. She has not publicly talked about what happened.
Now, as the fourth anniversary of Alexa’s death approaches, Gina Duran says she feels stronger. She has started joking again with her husband. When asked how long they have been together, she quipped, “Too long!”
Grief’s stages
“There are five stages in the grief process,” Gina Duran explains while sitting on a black leather couch in their northwest Miami-Dade home, twirling her gold chain necklace. “Now I’m in the fifth stage: acceptance. I used to think she would come home anytime. But now I’ve accepted that she won’t be back. I’m no longer waiting for her, even though I love her and miss her so much.”
She no longer harbors hate toward FIU or any of the companies involved in the building of the bridge. Last spring, around the time Alexa would have graduated from FIU with a political science degree, Gina Duran visited the West Miami-Dade campus. For the first time, she didn’t feel like fleeing.
In late December, the Durans sold D’Dago, the family’s dry-cleaning business in Hialeah where Alexa used to work and where they maintained “Alexa’s corner.”
With the new year, Gina plans to break down her daughter’s room, more than 1,400 days after the accident. She plans to frame the corkboard and whiteboard and photos, and clear the rest of her belongings, including the pair of 6-inch black stilettos packed in a Macy’s bag that Alexa bought a few weeks before her death.
Orlando Duran has visited his daughter’s room less frequently than his wife, but the loss of his daughter, whom he considered his best friend, cut through him just as fiercely.
“When she left, a part of me also left,” he says, adding he hasn’t been able to play guitar or sing since she perished.
Sitting by his wife on the couch, he points to the high school graduation photo of Alexa by the front door. He says goodbye to her every time he leaves their home.
“I honor Alexa,” he says.
But he has overcome the worst part of the trauma: “I am doing much better. I realized that life continues.”
‘FIU accepted responsibility’
The 174-foot-long, 950-ton span was supposed to traverse over an eight-lane section of Tamiami Trail, one of the busiest roadways in South Florida. The footbridge was intended to protect pedestrians — particularly students, many of whom live in Sweetwater and cross the Trail to get to FIU’s Modesto A. Maidique Campus.
At 1:47 p.m. on March 15, 2018, the span, which had been hoisted into place by special gantry cranes on the Saturday morning before the crash, snapped at the north end, causing the entire structure to come crashing down, burying cars at the red light at Southwest Eighth Street and 109th Avenue. The collapse killed one construction worker and five people in their cars.
Alexa, who was driving her father’s Toyota 4Runner, was heading east on the Trail when the steel and concrete cascaded down, crushing her to death as she sat behind the wheel waiting for the light to turn.
FIGG Bridge Group, the Tallahassee parent company of a network of firms specializing in bridge design and construction, designed the $14.3 million project, funded with federal grant money. Munilla Construction Management, a politically connected construction company in Miami, and inspectors Bolton, Perez & Associates Consulting Engineers also worked on it. FIU proposed the project and helped oversee it.
After a 19-month investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded in October 2019 that FIU, the Florida Department of Transportation, as well as the project’s design-build team and inspectors, failed to react properly to cracks forming and made a fatal error in leaving the heavily trafficked Southwest Eighth Street open while a construction crew performed emergency work on the bridge.
Munilla Construction filed bankruptcy in March 2019. The company agreed to a $103 million settlement with the victims’ families, then resurfaced as Magnum Construction Management.
In January 2021, the Federal Highway Administration barred FIGG Bridge Engineers and its lead engineer, W. Denney Pate, from participating in federal contracting for nine years. The state of Florida continues to do business with the company.
FIU plans to build a new bridge with a new design and “enhanced safety measures.”
“The case is closed,” said Orlando Duran, an engineer himself.
“From all of the companies involved in the bridge collapse, none of the companies offered apologies other than FIU. FIU accepted responsibility for it and offered their apologies,” he added.
Campus memorial
FIU and the Durans have been working on a campus memorial for Alexa, timed to the fourth anniversary of her death. The memorial will feature a bronze statue of Alexa sculpted by Brian Hanlon. He decided to include 18 doves, for each year of her life. Five posts will surround Alexa, symbolizing the other victims. A ceremony will take place on March 15, featuring a moment of silence at 1:47 p.m.
The bridge collapse stung the FIU community and damaged the university’s reputation.
But nearly four years later, FIU President Mark Rosenberg sees the bridge collapse, while horrific, as allowing FIU to learn from its mistakes.
“You probably learn more from your setbacks than you do from your successes,” he said. “And certainly we learned a lot. If you think about it, look at how we’ve rebounded. Look at how we’ve taken that adversity and leveraged it against making a better university.”
Some members of the FIU community, however, prefer not to talk about the accident and its aftermath.
That doesn’t sit well with Gina Duran, who regularly talks about her daughter.
“That’s bull----,” she said. “I like talking about her and about what happened.”
She thinks discussing the bridge collapse and its causes will help prevent a future disaster.
She’s now asking FIU to ensure the bridge doesn’t fall again — otherwise, she said, her daughter’s death will have meant nothing.
“It will be in vain if this happens again,” she warned.
