The Lives Lived and Lost

Please be advised, this podcast contains graphic audio and themes that may not be appropriate for all listeners. There's so much life in each one, each one of these apartments and condos, so much life that just have to be like a forensic detective and start pulling back the layers and just examining each person who lived in that building. We have been hearing the word forensic a lot in this series in the context of the forensic investigation into how and why Champlain Tower South failed so catastrophically almost a year ago. But what long time Miami-Herald reporter and editor Joan Crisos is talking about here is being a forensic detective when it comes to the stories of the lives lost in the disaster. Last June in her role of running health and education coverage, Crisos was focused on COVID and school closures in South Florida. But on the morning of June 24th, her role changed dramatically. I have worked at the Herald for more than 35 years and after Surfside, I became the editor in charge of telling the stories of those who are missing and those who died. As we've heard throughout this series, the Herald has covered Surfside from every possible angle from the very beginning. There were reporters on the scene at the hospitals at Surfside Town Hall working the phones talking to structural engineers, talking to survivors, finding family members, all of those voices that we've heard from in the first 11 episodes in our series. We have gone deep inside every aspect of this story with these reporters. How did this actually happen in the middle of the night with just out of nowhere? But I'm not sure there's anything that really prepares you for a mind-boggling that is. We had never seen anything like this. It defied the imagination. Why did the building fall down? What happened? What caused that? This looked like a miniature version of the Twin Towers and we had to figure out how to cover that. I heard the big boom boom boom. I don't know if I have to win or not. I even know what I did. And then you'll come downstairs and like, did you hear that? I say, that's the elevator, cheesy. No one knows. We're going to need assistance with this rescue from the second floor to fill it this out. The building is at risk for further collapse. We've heard them reconstruct the collapse timeline using witness and survivor accounts. 9-1-1 calls, even the sound of rebar snapping inside concrete in a lab. We've heard these reporters tell us the history of the town of Surfside. How Canadian developers made Champlain Towers a reality and how the son of a Cuban immigrant put up a super luxury building right next door. We've also been exclusively inside the briefing room where families waited for word of their missing loved ones. We've been inside the courtroom where neighbors pointed fingers and fought over money. We've heard about the massive settlement which we'll hear more about later in this episode and we've been inside the story of how, thanks to Florida politics, change will be slow to calm if it comes at all in the wake of this tragedy. We are going to transition from search and rescue to search and recovery. My pain is unbearable. I am constantly suffered. My heart is shattered into a million pieces and beyond repair. Once you get past the engineers and the contractors and the developers and the town of Surfside and the condo association and the consultants, you start blaming your neighbor. This memorial should be a permanent reminder of what happened here at 87/7 Collins Avenue. We do not build over dead bodies. I have awakened in the middle of the night screaming. The surreal abyss that confronted us when we opened our front door to face the ocean. And the feeling of water around my ankles in the garage paralyzing me with the fear of being electrocuted. Buildings do not just randomly collapse in the middle of the night. I'm Paul Beben and in this, our final episode of Collapse Disaster in Surfside, we are going back to the beginning to that first morning when Joan Crissos and the rest of the heralds top editors were on a Zoom call still trying to get their heads around this disaster and it's staggering human toll. We are going to spend most of this last episode hearing about and honoring the lives lived and lost in this tragedy. And we will hear from Joan Crissos and other journalists at the herald about the pain staking process of care, compassion and craft that has gone into writing about all 98 of them. There was a lot of adrenaline. It was probably late morning when we had that meeting and so we're still coming off of what's going on, what happened. Deploying people, we're just trying to figure this out. And it was maybe 10 editors, 10 or 11, 12 editors and we start parsing out teams and who's going to do what? Who's going to be there for the spot news at the site and who are the team of people that are going to be 24/7 at that site? Who's going to start looking into problems on the investigative front? We had been around long enough to know with big stories that's usually there's a problem that has to be investigated and then in this case we knew that there were going to be people missing. Initially, we thought there were about 150 people in that building. I don't know how we got that number, but we thought there was 140 to 150 people who had perished in that building. And in that meeting, the herald made a decision, a commitment. The newsroom was going to do much more than just identify everyone who died in this disaster know. Every single life lost was going to be reported out and remembered with a full obituary. And that, that was a job for Joan Crisos. We didn't expect a lot of the people in that building to come out and be rescued in the rubble. We figured that there may be one or two or three, but most of the people who are in that building were not going to have survived and that we have to start putting a team together to write stories about the people in the building. And as we start plotting what we're going to do and who's going to handle what, I just remember being asked, told, volunteered, I don't remember exactly what happened, but Joan, you're going to lead the coverage of the people. We want to do stories on every single person in that building. Crisos' first love is writing about people. And she told me that on this very first day, she had a kind of revelation. And she faced the seemingly terrible task of making a list of the lost, of putting faces to names and then telling the final version of their life stories, drawing a circle around a seemingly bottomless pool of grief and sorrow. She realized that this was the work that she had been meant to do and had been preparing for it for her entire career. She was in the right place at the right time and she felt humbled, grateful, to be right where she was. This building was an amazing tapestry of people who lived there. There were people from ages one years old to 92, 92. Such a rich mixture of people, there were teachers, coaches, there was a whole network of people who came from the Cuban, Jewish, Puerto Rican, diaspora. There were young families that were starting over. That building was, people gravitated to start a new life. For the years I've written so many profiles, it's what I love to do and I love the details about telling the stories of people's lives and getting the details that nobody else has. So I looked at this as Oh my goodness, this is everything I have always loved about journalism. To write the stories about people, and I couldn't think of a more meaningful way to tell the stories about the people who died and honoring them. And it was such an honor for me to be in charge of this team. It was all my strengths and all my years, more than 35 years at the herald. Coming together in one moment, to focus on the stories about the people who died that terrible day. Miami herald editor Joan Crisos told me that while writing about the missing got underway immediately, it soon transitioned to writing mostly about the dead. Initially, when we were first writing the stories about the people, we wrote them as the nests of the missing. And we started that on Thursday and Friday and all through the weekend. And because the first victims were not announced by the police until maybe Saturday. And it was one victim, just one person. And she was pulled from the rubble and she died in the hospital. She's the only person that was actually pulled from the rubble alive, along with her son, but he survived. We were on two tracks. We were writing obituaries of the people whose bodies had been recovered, but we were still writing the nests of the missing in the hope that maybe, maybe they would be recovered alive. Until they were announced by the police that their bodies had been found. And even though it wasn't official until search and rescue became search and recovery in early July, Crisos told me that writing those vignettes, those little stories about the missing. Well, that didn't last very long. You knew? Maybe? Yeah. By Sunday we knew we weren't writing missing stories anymore. We were writing obituaries. Yeah. I would say that that's the case. I think the first set of obituaries ran in Monday's paper. You know, I would say by Monday or Tuesday, it became evident that we were going to be writing obituaries no longer missing vignettes. The list coming from the police department, which is what we had to go by, or two or three people. At the end of the day, these were the people whose bodies were recovered on this date and their names. After we'd written these missing vignettes of people and we'd written maybe a few dozen, then we had to go back to those stories and make them into obits because we had quotes from people saying, I'm praying right now. I'm praying that they're going to be found. You know, and we had quotes like that from people in the missing. So we had to go back totally and rewrite them as obituaries from the missing. Veteran journalists often approach obituaries as a privilege, the honor of writing a life story, and it's got a natural structure to work with, a beginning, a middle, and an end. But when the end is so shocking and so sudden for so many of all ages and stages of life, even the most seasoned writers can wither under the emotional weight of this work. Chrisso said the story of one family in particular, the Caterrasses, hit the staff especially hard. Three generations, aged 7 to 89, were wiped out in the collapse. Before we talk about this one family though, I want to say that all of these lives are worthy of our attention. There are so many more than we can do in just one episode. But each and every one is memorialized in a special section on the Harold's website. Floor by floor, unit by unit, you can go through the building to see who lived where and link to what the Harold wrote about them. A little background now about the Caterrasses, this multi-generational family lived in unit 501. Geno, 89, was a retired engineer from Argentina who loved to paint. His wife, Graciella Ponce de Leon, 86, was a former United Nations diplomat from Uruguay, who was also passionate about the arts. Her daughter, Graciella 48, had built a photography business while raising her little girl Stella, who was 7. And if you listen to episode 7, you can hear Mariana Lopez, a survivor, who worked at the school where Stella and three of her schoolmates in Champlain Tower South were enrolled. I am the registrar at Moons Cabe Road Bay Harbor K8 Center, the local public school. The part of the children who perished that night, Emma, Lucía, Stella and Lorenzo were all students at the school. I watched them grow both at home and in school. Many of us at Bay Harbor School, teachers, administrators and classmates share in grieving the loss of these innocents. At the time of the disaster, Stella's aunt Andrea, who was 56, was in town from Buenos Ari, staying with her younger sister, her niece and her parents. She was there to help out while Geno recovered from having a pacemaker replaced. Joan Crisos told me about some of the detective work that Harold reporter Adriana Brasileiro did to tell the story of this loving, cultured and cosmopolitan clan of five. She was able to uncover by going back to the original United Nations archives. Most people wouldn't even know how to do that. From the 1950s, that this woman was a key person meeting people like Nikita Khrushchev, Aldemier and working for the Orguayan Ambassador to the UN who was a key official in the creation of the state of Israel. And all that came through the obituary of this one family who lived in the Champlain Towers. It still gives me chills when I'm telling you this story about little Stella and her mother and her father and her grandparents and her aunt. The only one who still alive is the father, the Miami firefighter who kept, who kept digital at that scene. The story of Stella's father, a Miami firefighter and as Crisos said, Stella's only remaining close relative is one of almost unbearable grief. He has asked the Harold and other media outlets not to identify him. She was at the site for seven days and eight nights until Stella and her mother were recovered together on July 2nd. A day or two later, while search operations were still ongoing, Harold reporter Alex Harris interviewed Broward County battalion chief Nicole Naughty. She's a canine handler who had been combing the site in 16 hour shifts with her dog named Dig since the early morning of June 24th. As the work ground on behind them, Naughty told Harris about the moment when Stella and her mother were found. When the more than 200 emergency workers on the pile stopped their equipment and stood silent while Stella, her mother and her father left the site. The quietness of the site, all the construction machines shut down, nobody making a sound, no concrete being moved, no metal sound, nothing, just the sound of the footsteps of them carrying her away. It's definitely going to live in my mind forever. Here is Joan Crisos reading the first few lines of the story that Alex Harris wrote about Nicole Naughty and her struggles to deal with the trauma of her job. There will be many scars from the days that Nicole, Naughty and her dog, Dig, have spent searching the ruins of Champlain Tower South, hoping for signs of life and finding none. But she knows one moment will haunt her. The recovery of Stella Caterassi, the 70-year-old daughter of a fellow firefighter who had stood vigil at the site. The quietness of the site, all the construction machines shut down, nobody making a sound, no concrete being moved, no metal sounds, nothing, just the sounds of the footsteps of them carrying her away. It's definitely going to live in my mind forever." Stella's aunt Andrea was found on July 5th, and her grandparents were recovered on July 6th. The work of writing 98 obituary took more than a month. Estelle Hadaya was one of the first people identified as missing on June 26th, but her remains weren't identified until July 26th. The herald published her full obituary, the last one, on July 29th, and here's how it begins. Estelle Hadaya went by different names depending on her audience. Her family and friends called her Stella, for short, but she was also known as Cha Cha for her iconic moves on the dance floor. Online, she was known as the author of a travel and food blog called Follow the Toes. Hadaya, 54, was identified as one of the 98 victims in the collapse of the Champlain Tower South condo in Surfside. She lived in apartment 604. And as I mentioned earlier, you can find all of these remembrances in a special section on the herald's website. It's called A Neighborhood Lost. At the same time, the Miami herald was covering the loss of individual lives in Champlain Tower South. It was also covering the collective loss, the disappearance of what had been the vibrant community of this building. Long time herald reporter Linda Robertson called it a small town within a small town. Champlain Tower South was the first high rise. It was only 13 stories high, but it was the first oceanfront high rise in this little town of Surfside. It was built in 1981 during a real building boom time in Miami. The way that it had evolved, the way that the people who lived there had changed over the years, was a real reflection of greater Miami's demographic evolution as well. So I thought it would be interesting not only to bring these people sort of back to life in a way so that our readers could relate to them and empathize with their family members, but also to show how this place was a reflection of Miami itself. Robertson has been a reporter for the herald since 1983. Much of it as a sports writer who specialized in deep profiles in one of her many pieces about Champlain Tower South. She wrote, "Why those 98 people ranging in age from 1 to 92 years old were killed in a 25 million pound avalanche of steel, furniture, appliances, sinks, ceilings, computers, shoes, and air looms is eternally unanswerable. Tragedy doesn't explain itself. What can be reconstructed is how victims and survivors came to be in Champlain South on that night, most asleep inside their piece of paradise, whether placed thereby routine, delivered by fate, carried by sorrow, or drawn by love." Robertson told me she thought the building would be recognizable to a wide audience, the millions of people who have visited South Florida. It was an older building, it wasn't a luxury condominium, so I think a lot of people sort of could relate to the building and the people who live there because so many people have vacationed in South Florida in Miami and they've stayed in buildings on the waterfront, on the oceanfront that weren't particularly high end. Originally this building was occupied by a lot of older immigrants, especially Cuban immigrants. Then over time it had changed more families living there, more Latin Americans from different countries, aside from Cuba, more international kind of crowd living there. Kids had moved in with their parents, so it was kind of a microcosm of Miami as well. "Over the years," Robertson said, the building had also drawn a large number of Jewish residents, especially from Latin America. "Surfside has a higher Jewish population than the country as a whole. There are a number of synagogues there and a number of orthodox synagogues that people can walk to on the Sabbath. And when Cubans first immigrated to Miami in 1959 and the early '60s, a lot of them end up in Miami Beach because there was a major synagogue there that was supporting them and welcoming them. And surfside became like a logical sort of move up in the world because instead of staying at these little hotel efficiencies in Miami Beach, they could move into a building like a Champlain Tower South. They could move into these little homes in surfside, nicer buildings. And so it became a hub of the Cuban population. And one of the nicknames was the Tower of the Oboilas because a lot of Cuban grandmothers lived there and Jewish Cuban grandmothers and that's Oboila. And they would have their grandkids over swimming the pool and play on the beach. Over time, it just became sort of a hub for that group. And thus, this idea that everybody knew someone in that building, if you lived in Miami." In one of her stories on Champlain Tower South, Robertson spoke with Sergio Luzano, who lost both of his parents. Luzano lived nearby and had dinner with them the night of the 23rd. He told Robertson, quote, "What hurts the most is that these people died in their home. They were betrayed by their own home. We recognize the warning signs now, but they never saw it coming." Joan Crisose has been Robertson's close friend and editor for years. Linda gets details. Like nobody gets details. He has that curiosity and wants to know, you know, Sergio Luzano. Not only did he have dinner with his parents the night before the tower collapsed, but she wanted to know what he had for dinner. He had pork tenderloin because that was his favorite dish and his mother made it. And the dessert with the lady fingers, you know, with the custard, you could visualize them on the plate. You could smell them. You could taste them. That's what a good reporter does. Brings you there to the moment. Another of the many relatives Robertson spoke with was Pablo Rodriguez, who lost his mother and grandmother. Rodriguez talked about the first day and the agony of waiting for his abuela and his bisabuela to be identified. My uncle called me that morning and he just kept crying and apologizing and saying, "Your mom, she's playing. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry." And we're like, "What are you talking about? Turn on the news." And all you see is the pictures of the building collapsed. We start calling them. We start trying to reach them, trying to reach the emergency numbers. At the time, we actually had a little bit of hope because from the pictures it looked like maybe her unit was one of the lucky ones that was spared. We hop in the car, start going over to surfside. And on the way there, my wife's driving, I'm looking on the phone, trying to get any information I can. And about halfway there, that's when the video was released of the tower collapsing. And I lost it at that point because I can see my mom's apartment just come completely crashing down and then another building fall on top of it. So it's at that moment, it's really the moment that I was watching them die. That's all that I kept seeing in my head. It was just one really long, long day that was a nightmare where I was just walking around, not sure what day it was, what's happening. It was all a fog. And everything that kept replaying in my head was just the video of the building collapsing, seeing my mom, my grandmother die and wondering all kinds of different scenarios on where they suffering, they survived the crash and then died. How long were they suffering? Which way, like all these, trying not to let myself go there, but it just kept going on the different ways that they were suffering. When the police department showed up to notify us, they told us that they found both of them in the medical examiner's opinion, they didn't suffer and they probably wouldn't have even known that the building collapsed. Not sure how they know that. I don't know if even if it's true or not, but I'm willing to believe it because I need to believe that. Manuel Manny Lafont was a beloved baseball coach who had lived in Unit 801 for more than a decade, previously with his two kids and wife Adriana before they divorced. Many in Adriana shared custody of Mia and Santi. Lafont coached Santi's baseball team, the Astros. But it rained on June 23rd in practice, was canceled, so Lafont called Adriana to ask if Santi could sleep over, which he often did. They were watching a soccer game on TV, Brazil versus Colombia. But Adriana told Linda Robertson she just wanted Santi home that night, and Mani said okay, and drove Santi to her place. Here's Adriana recorded by the herald, as she visited the site of her family's former home. I live in Champlain towers for 11 years, and I had such a great memories from this place. I thought that I would be stronger coming here, but I don't know, the air, the sea, the place brings so much emotions to me, so much memories that it's so painful that we don't have that anymore, because we lost money, but we also lost everything that belongs to him. We don't have anything, anything. So that is even harder to accept. To come here is very hard. I cannot imagine my kids coming here to this beach again. The night Santi was playing with Mani, baseball, as usual, and around 830 they call me and Mani asked me, "Adriana, may I stay with Santi for tonight?" For some reason, that at this day I don't understand why my mouth says no. And for some reason, Mani accepted without saying anything. He said, "Okay, I will bring it to your house. For me, that's a miracle. I mean, that's it. It was not my kids' day to die that night. That's it. There is no other explanation." No other explanation, as Linda Robertson wrote, "Tragity doesn't explain itself." Before we conclude this series, we're going to hear one more time from Judge Michael Hansman, who oversaw the class action lawsuit filed by the victim's families and the survivors against a slew of defendants. You may recall we reported that a nearly $1 billion settlement was reached just a couple of weeks ago in the class action case, and since then, the beachfront lot where the building stood has been sold for $120 million, bringing the total money available to almost $1.1 billion. The task of distributing that money to the families and survivors is just getting underway and is expected to take many months. The size of the settlement took even Judge Hansman by surprise when it was announced in court. You could hear him gasp and mutter, Jesus. Under his breath, he was so thankful and astonished at the result. And then addressed the court, heaping praise on the lawyers and others on all sides who had brought swift resolution to such an enormously complex and emotional case. He spoke to the families, quoting Cicero, "and because it's a little hard to hear him, here is the line. There is no grief, which time does not lessen or soften." I pray that's true. I'm not sure it is because some of these victims deserve to have been in this line. And we know that. And I'm not going to say I've heard that this resolution allows them to do bond or heal or anything like that because that's just not true. And one thing I always promise the good things in this case in the beginning is honestly. And we all know that there's no amount of money in the world that can possibly compensate for some of the loss that we've heard about in this case over the last 10 months. We are taking a tragic, black swan event which I hope we will never see again. And we have done the best we can in a judicial form to try to resolve it for these victims. Now, you know, to the lawyers, I just want to say again, stepping up with no assurance of compensation doing this as a public service. I don't want to be tried, but there are a couple quotes that I think are pertinent here today. And I'm going to quote Don Deep the one, which is the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. And Martin Luther King who said lights most powerful urge and urgent question is what are you doing for others? I know this has been a very difficult task for the lawyers emotionally. They've given up their time, time with their families. I hope that you're as proud of yourself as I am of you. I hope in doing this as a quasi public service you have found something about yourself and learned some things about yourself. And I hope that you know what you have done for others. And you appreciate what you have done for others because what you have done for these victims of this tragedy is just simply remarkable. I don't know what else there is to say. This case has just been extremely difficult for everyone involved. And I'm just overwhelmed with gratitude. I just do not need more proud of all of you. Finally now to what journalists sometimes call the long tail of a story. The Harold recently won, you might have heard, this year's Pulitzer Prize for its breaking news coverage of Surfside. But it's investigative coverage, which we've heard a lot of in this series has never stopped and is still ongoing. The investigative team still has more big stories about Surfside to break even as the first anniversary approaches. Casey Frank has been at the Harold for more than 40 years as a reporter, editor, and for the last decade, the editor in charge of the investigative team. In the wake of their reporting, federal investigators actually reached out to experts about the causes of the collapse, something Frank said is fairly unprecedented. Now, Casey Frank is a very self-effacing midwesterner from Chicago who resisted being interviewed for this podcast. He wanted to focus on his team's work, which he did in our interview. But I think you'll be as glad as I am that I convinced him to let me record him. The Miami-Herald has a tradition of investigative reporting that goes back probably close to a century. Back to the nightbrothers, John and James Knight, who were the founders of the Nightrider newspaper chain, great traditional tough newsmen who believed that this wasn't just a business. Yes, they wanted to make money, but they wanted to tell stories, tell the truth, and old people are accountable. And they made sure that the Miami-Herald did. And that tradition has been handed down like an heirloom for decade after decade after decade. And I watched it for a long time, seeing the great investigative editors that came before me, admired them, wanted to be them, inspired to do the things that they did. And finally, ten years ago, I got that chance. And it has been a privilege. It can be scary at times, because so much crazy stuff happens in South Florida. And you need eight hands, eight arms in order to get your arms around it. And I think that's what we did with Surfside. I really believe that looking back on the last year, that we did this right, that we did an honorable job, that we continue to draw a terrible job of getting to the bottom, what took place in this building. And I think that's what we did in the past, because the survivors, the families of the dead, the people who lived through this for a deal, come to us and say, "Thank you for the work that you've done." On behalf of the team at Tree Fort Media, I want to add our thanks to the survivors, the families, and to our fellow journalists at the Miami Herald for their high standards, their hard work, and for their collaboration with us. We hope that together, as Cassie Frank just said, that we have done an honorable job. job of presenting this story. And as we heard Judge Hansman say, we are so grateful to everyone who gave their time and energy and emotion to this narrative journalism project. It has been a tremendous privilege. May our work here be worthy of the 98 lives lost and may their memories be a blessing. Perhaps disaster in Surfside is produced by Tree Fort Media, the Miami Herald, and the Maclatchy Company. Visit MiamiHerald.com/Surfside-podcast. That's all lowercase. To learn more about our investigation and to read articles mentioned in today's episode. And if you can, please rate the episode as well, as it'll help others find our podcast. Our hearts and our admiration go out to our guests who have so bravely shared their story so that we may bring to light the many stories of all the people impacted by this tragedy. We also want to thank the experts who have joined us for sharing their insights. Special thanks to the team at WLRN in Miami, as well as CBS 4 News in Miami, for sharing supplementary materials to help us tell this story. Collapse disaster in Surfside was executive produced by Kelly Garner and Lisa Amerman for Tree Fort Media, Monica Richardson, and Rick Hirsch for the Miami Herald. I'm your host, Paul Beben. The series was written and produced by Eric Salant and me, Paul Beben, for Tree Fort Media. Editing by Maxwell Carney and Abigail Sullivan. Mixed by Maxwell Carney. Tree Fort Head of Audio is Tom Monahan. Line produced by Oscar Guido. English translations by Anne Lu and Lindsay Whistler. With additional production assistance by Jared Brom, Haley Mandelberg, Colin Motel, and Lindsay Whistler. For the Miami Herald, Monica Richardson serves as executive editor. Managing editor is Rick Hirsch. Senior Vice President of News, Kristen Roberts. Senior Vice President of Advertising, Tony Berg. McClatchy Managing Editor, Cynthia Dubose, Audience Development Editor, Adrian Ruiz. Miami Investigative Editor, Casey Frank. Miami Herald Senior Editor, Dave Wilson. Miami Herald Information Services, Monica Leal. Copyright 2021 by Tree Fort Media and the Miami Herald. Sound Recording Copyright 2021 by Tree Fort Media. [BLANK_AUDIO]