(WASHINGTON) — The ruling is a victory for Republicans, who have enacted 22 laws restricting voting in 14 states.
In a second significant opinion Thursday, the US Supreme Court divided 6-3 along ideological lines to strike down a California law that required charities to privately disclose the identities of major donors to the state attorney general.
State officials had argued that the identities, which not-for-profit charities are allowed to keep secret from the public, would help enforce rules around tax-exempt status and catch potential fraud.
A pair of conservative groups that challenged the requirement — and backed by the ACLU, NAACP and others — argued the state was unnecessarily violating the donors’ First Amendment right to free association and that prior leaks of the information exposed donors to harassment and attacks.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative majority, sided with the charities, concluding “the Attorney General’s disclosure requirement imposes a widespread burden on donors’ associational rights. And this burden cannot be justified on the ground that the regime is narrowly tailored to investigating charitable wrongdoing, or that the state’s interest in administrative convenience is sufficiently important.”
Justice Roberts wrote that the state did not sufficiently consider alternative means of gathering the information or protecting against fraud. He said the current requirement could create a “chilling effect” on donors because of the state’s documented history of leaks of private donor information.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan, said the charities challenging the rule failed to show any concrete harm by the disclosure requirement.
“The Court jettisons completely the longstanding requirement that plaintiffs demonstrate an actual First Amendment burden,” Sotomayor wrote. “It can point to no record evidence demonstrating that the regulation is likely to chill a substantial portion of the donors. These moves are wholly inconsistent with the Court’s precedents and our Court’s long-held view that disclosure requirements only indirectly burden First Amendment rights.”
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center summed up the impact of this case as relatively limited, if disappointing, to transparency advocates and watchdogs in a statement.
“Wealthy special interests scored a win, albeit a narrow one. We at Campaign Legal Center are disappointed that the majority chose to sidestep established precedent recognizing the important public interests in nonprofit reporting and relatively minimal burdens such reporting imposes. While the standard of review applied by the Court here was unduly skeptical, it is one transparency laws in the electoral context easily meet, limiting the reach of this case. The decision does not call into question the longstanding laws and regulations requiring public disclosure of campaign spending.”
(LOS ANGELES) — At least 17 people were injured by a massive explosion Wednesday night following the Los Angeles Police Department’s attempts to detonate a cache of illegal fireworks in South Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Fire Department said.
Soon after the explosion, Arturo Cejas, 27, a resident of the home where police found the fireworks, was arrested on charges of possessing a destructive device. His bail is set to $500,000.
Ten of the injured are LAPD officers, one is an ATF officer and six are civilians.
Three of the six civilians are being transported to the hospital with serious injuries. The others, along with nine LAPD officers and the ATF officer, are being treated for minor injuries. One of the injured officers was treated at the scene and not transported to the hospital.
“Our Bomb Squad officers were in the process of seizing over 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in the area of 27th Street and San Pedro. Some of the fireworks were being stored in our Bomb Squad trailer as a precautionary measure,” the LAPD wrote on Twitter Wednesday evening.
Our Bomb Squad officers were in the process of seizing over 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks in the area of 27th Street and San Pedro. Some of the fireworks were being stored in our Bomb Squad trailer as a precautionary measure. Unknown at this time what caused an explosion.
In a late-night press conference, LAPD Chief Michel Moore and LAFD Chief Ralph Terrazas said they moved to confiscate the illegal commercial-grade fireworks from Cejas’ home and worked all day to clear them and move them to an offsite location.
They then came across approximately 40 Coca-Cola can-sized improvised explosive devices with fuses and 200 additional smaller devices with similar construction.
That material was transferred into a multi-ton containment vehicle with an iron chamber inside that is designed to house explosive material that can be safely detonated.
At approximately 7:37 p.m. local time, those items were detonated — that’s when the containment vehicle had a catastrophic failure.
The explosion damaged cars and surrounding buildings and left debris scattered on the streets.
Alyssa Casillas, an Instagram user who took a video of the explosion, told Storyful that police said to the crowd the fireworks “were going to be contained in the truck when set off.”
“The police also told us it would be a small boom and nothing big,” the user said. “As we waited to hear the small boom, the whole truck blew up.”
“Our firefighters on scene started triaging the injured starting with officers,” Terrazas said. “In total we had 75 firefighters on scene.”
Moore said they knocked on every door near the area and people self-evacuated.
The LAFD said several homes were impacted and LA Building and Safety is evaluating them to determine their status and see if anyone will be displaced.
Moore said during the press conference that Cejas acquired the fireworks out of state with the purpose of reselling them to community members for use during July 4th. Child endangerment charges will also be pursued since Cejas’ 10-year-old brother was residing in the house with him.
The LAPD along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will investigate who supplied him with the fireworks.
Moore said that last year, the LAPD recovered more than 4 tons of illegal fireworks, which adds up to more than 8,000 pounds.
(PORTLAND, Ore.) — Unrelenting heat waves are still pounding the Northeast and Pacific Northwest — but cooler weather is on its way for East Coast residents.
Heat is a silent killer. On average, more people die from heat than any other severe weather, including tornadoes, hurricanes or flooding, according to the National Weather Service.
Since Friday, there have been 45 heat-related deaths in Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland, officials said. “Many of those who died were found alone, without air conditioning or a fan,” the county medical examiner said in a press release. There have been 63 heat-related deaths statewide in the current heat wave, the Oregon state medical examiner said.
In Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle, 11 people have died from the heat, according to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. In Benton County, Washington, a 73-year-old woman with underlying conditions died; the cause was related to hyperthermia from the heat, said coroner William Leach.
President Joe Biden addressed the historic heat on Wednesday, saying, “We need people to check on their neighbors, especially seniors, who may need a helping hand.”
The dangerous heat also struck Canada. Vancouver police said they’ve responded to 98 sudden deaths since Friday, and two-thirds of the victims are over the age of 70. The causes of death haven’t been determined, but police said the number of calls have been higher than usual during the heat wave.
The record heat is over in Seattle and Portland. But on Tuesday, Spokane in eastern Washington hit a new record high temperature — 109 degrees.
The heat will continue for eastern Washington, eastern Oregon and California on Wednesday, and is also spreading into Montana and Idaho, where temperatures could climb above 100 degrees.
The hot and dry weather is also helping to fuel fires; there are now 47 large wildfires burning in the West.
Meanwhile, the Northeast is on its last day of its scorching heat wave.
Hartford, Connecticut, and Manchester, New Hampshire, smashed records Tuesday at 99 and 98 degrees respectively.
More record highs were set Wednesday with temperatures reaching 98 degrees in New York’s Central Park, the hottest temperature in eight years, while Newark, New Jersey, reached 102 — tied for the highest temperature all-time in June. LaGuardia Airport in New York City also set a daily record at 100 degrees.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to cut back on energy use to avoid a widespread outage, noting that about 1,700 customers were without power in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Wednesday.
Severe weather will then move into the Northeast Wednesday afternoon. A severe thunderstorm watch is in effect from western New York to Maine. Wind gusts will post the biggest threat from Albany to Boston to Portland, and isolated large hail and brief tornadoes are possible.
Then the Northeast will get a cool down. By Friday and Saturday temperatures will fall to the mid 80s in Philadelphia and New York, and plunge to the 60s in Boston.
(NEW YORK) — The heat wave that hit the Northwest this past weekend and into this week is one for the record books, and likely has links to climate change, experts say.
“This heat wave is simply astounding,” said Robert Rohde, Ph.D., lead scientist at Berkeley Earth in California. “The heat wave has brought the largest increases in temperature above normal highs ever measured during summer anywhere in North America. Based on what was normal during the 20th century, a heat wave like this in the Pacific Northwest would be expected to occur no more than once in 1,000 years. Global warming has made events like this more likely, but it should still be considered quite rare.”
Portland, Oregon, set a new all-time record high of 116 degrees on Monday, making it the third straight day that the city saw a new all-time record high. Seattle hit a new all-time record high on Monday as well, with temperatures reaching 108 degrees — its second consecutive day seeing an all-time record high. Multiple weather stations in Washington State reached 118 degrees, the hottest temperature the state has ever recorded.
This heatwave didn’t just shatter records in the U.S., but Canada too. There were historic all-time high temperatures from the heatwave in Lytton, British Columbia, which hit a sweltering 121 degrees on Tuesday afternoon — the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada and the third day of consecutive all-time highs in the city. By comparison, Lytton’s temperature went higher than some parts of the Southwest desert, like Las Vegas, where the hottest temperature on record is 117 degrees.
According to the National Weather Service, heat kills more people on average than any other weather disaster in the U.S.
U.S. heat waves have been becoming more frequent, lasting longer and are more intense than ever before — a clear symptom of climate change. Although this historic heat wave in the Pacific Northwest is quite rare, events like this could start happening more often, according to Zeke Hausfather, Ph.D., director of climate and energy at The Breakthrough Institute.
“Summers in the Pacific Northwest have warmed around [3 degrees Fahrenheit] over the past century, with nearly all of that warming occurring in the years since 1970,” Hausfather said. “The heatwave currently occurring in the Pacific Northwest would have been an unusually severe heat wave in the absence of historical warming, but on top of warming, it’s blowing past old records for the region.”
Hausfather said that due to climate change, a heat wave of this magnitude could occur not once every 1,000 years, but rather, closer to once every 100 years.
“If we continue to increase global emissions, it may be a one-in-10 year event by the end of the century,” Hausfather said.
A small increase in the earth’s average temperature can dramatically impact climate extremes, both hot and cold, increasing their chances of occurring exponentially.
“Rare events can have their frequency greatly altered by small changes in the mean,” Rohde said. “As the average global temperature rises, extremes will be prevalent for both cold and heat. However, these extreme heat events are occurring more frequently with more severity, and therefore they will likely push our average temperatures higher for years to come. We’ve already seen average temperatures over the past decade going up.”
This brutal, record-shattering heat wave follows a record-shattering winter during which a cold blast hit the southern U.S. In February, much of Texas saw its coldest air since 1989, while six states in the central U.S. ranked February 2021 among their top 10 coldest Februaries ever.
Although the connection between the cold blast and climate change is less clear, it appears that two of the most impactful weather events of 2021 were at least in part due to extremes in temperature.
(SURFSIDE, Fla.) — At least 18 people are dead and 145 others remain unaccounted for after a 12-story residential building partially collapsed in South Florida’s Miami-Dade County last week, officials said.
The massive search and rescue operation marked its seventh day on Wednesday as crews continued to carefully comb through pancaked piles of debris in hopes of finding survivors. The partial collapse occurred around 1:15 a.m. local time Thursday at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the small, beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, according to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Raide Jadallah.
The latest bodies pulled from the rubble were those of two children, ages 4 and 10, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Wednesday evening.
“For any loss of life, especially given the unexpected, unprecedented nature of this event, is a tragedy. But the loss of our children is too great to bear,” the mayor said. “We’re now standing united once again with this terrible new revelation that children are the victims as well.”
So far, 139 people who were living or staying in the condominium at the time of the disaster have been accounted for and are safe, according to Levine Cava, who stressed that the numbers are “very fluid” and “continue to change.” Officials previously were including the number of deceased among those accounted for but are now separating the figures.
“Our teams have worked through the night, as they have every night, to make headway through the rubble,” Levine Cava said during a press conference in Surfside earlier on Wednesday. “The world is watching.”
‘We’re not going to leave anybody behind’
The remaining structure was cleared by rescue crews last week, and all resources have since been shifted to focusing on the debris, according to Jadallah. Hundreds of first responders and volunteers have been working around the clock to locate any survivors or human remains in the wreckage. However, poor weather conditions — among other challenges — have periodically forced them to pause their efforts.
“It’s been tough,” Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky said at the press conference Wednesday morning, before noting that crews are “hoping for a positive outcome.”
“The spirits are high,” he added. “We’re still moving forward.”
Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett told reporters that there have been questions from families about when the efforts will transition from search and rescue to recovery. But he said there’s a strong consensus among officials and rescuers: “We’re not going to leave anybody behind.”
“This is going to go on until we get everybody out of there,” Burkett said at the press conference Wednesday morning.
Crews have cut a vast trench through the pile to aid in their search, according to Levine Cava. As of Tuesday afternoon, they had moved more than 3 million pounds of concrete — over 850 cubic feet — according to Cominsky.
Meanwhile, dump trucks have begun moving debris to an alternate site, according to Kevin Guthrie, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, who told reporters that rescuers have “all the resources” they need.
Crews have still not physically reached the bottom of the pile but cameras placed inside showed voids and air pockets where people could be trapped, according to Jadallah.
More than 80 rescuers — each working 12-hour shifts — are on the pile at a time, listening for sounds and trying to tunnel through the wreckage, according to Andy Alvarez, the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s deputy incident commander overseeing search and rescue efforts. Speaking to ABC News on Monday, Alvarez described the process as both “frantic” and painstaking.
The conditions on the pile are “bad” and “not ideal” for rescuers, Alvarez said, due to heat, humidity and rain, but efforts are continuing around the clock. Crews are using various equipment and technology, including underground sonar systems that can detect victims and crane trucks that can remove huge slabs of concrete from the pile, according to Alvarez.
The site also has proven to be dangerous for rescuers. One area had to be roped off Tuesday due to falling debris, according to Burkett, and crews are no longer entering the remaining structure because it’s considered unstable, Levine Cava told reporters.
“We’re exhausting every avenue here but it’s a very, very dangerous situation and I can’t understate that,” Cominsky said at the press conference Wednesday morning.
It’s the largest-ever deployment of task force resources in state history for a non-hurricane event. But as the Atlantic hurricane season ramps up, officials are monitoring storms in the region in case some resources deployed to Surfside are needed elsewhere, according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“‘Tis the season, and you’ve got to be ready,” DeSantis said at the press conference on Wednesday.
Some of the first responders are members of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s urban search and rescue team, Florida Task Force-1, which is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Urban Search and Rescue Response System and has been deployed to disasters across the country and around the world. Search and rescue teams from Israel and Mexico have also joined the efforts in Surfside.
Although officials have continued to express hope that more people will be found alive, no survivors have been discovered in the rubble of the building since the morning it partially collapsed. Bodies, however, have been uncovered throughout the site, which crews have categorized into grids, according to Cominsky. The fire chief told reporters that rescuers with specially trained dogs are still “constantly” “searching for life” amid the debris.
Officials have asked families of the missing to provide DNA samples and unique characteristics of their loved ones, such as tattoos and scars, to help identify those found in the wreckage. Detectives are also in the process of conducting an audit of the list of those accounted and unaccounted for, according to Levine Cava.
“The process of verifying every name on this list is very slow and methodical,” the Miami-Dade County mayor said at the press conference Wednesday morning. “Sometimes we receive incomplete reports, we don’t have the full information, it’s difficult to reach the people who provided the reports.”
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Surfside on Thursday, according to a statement from the White House. Last week, the president approved an emergency declaration in Florida and ordered federal assistance to supplement state and local response efforts in the wake of the partial building collapse.
Investigation ‘will take a long time’
The cause of the partial collapse to a building that has withstood decades of hurricanes remains unknown. The Miami-Dade Police Department is leading an investigation into the incident.
“We are doing everything humanely possible — and then some — to get through this tragedy and we are doing it together,” Levine Cava said Wednesday.
The federal agency National Institute of Standards and Technology announced Wednesday that it has activated its national construction safety team to investigate the collapse.
The investigation will be a “fact-finding, not fault-finding” one that could take years, Dr. James Olthoff, director of the small agency that investigated the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11, said at Wednesday evening’s press conference.
“It will take time, possibly a couple of years, but we will not stop until we have determined the likely cause of this tragedy,” Olthoff said.
The Miami-Dade County mayor told ABC News last Friday that there was no evidence of foul play so far but that “nothing’s ruled out.”
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she plans “to request that our Grand Jury look at what steps we can take to safeguard our residents without jeopardizing any scientific, public safety, or potential criminal investigations.”
“I know from personally speaking with engineers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology that their investigation to determine exactly how and why the building collapsed will take a long time,” Rundle said in a statement Tuesday. “However, this is a matter of extreme public importance, and as the state attorney elected to keep this community safe, I will not wait.”
Built in the 1980s, the Champlain Towers South was up for its 40-year recertification and had been undergoing roof work, according to Surfside officials.
The partial collapse happened as the Champlain Towers South Condo Association was preparing to start a new construction project to make updates, according to Kenneth Direktor, a lawyer for the association. Direktor told ABC News last Thursday that the building had been through extensive inspections and the construction plans had already been submitted to the town but the only work that had begun was on the roof.
Direktor noted that he hadn’t been warned of any structural issues with the building or about the land it was built on. He said there was water damage to the complex, but that is common for oceanfront properties and wouldn’t have caused the partial collapse.
A 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University’s Institute of Environment in Miami, found signs of land subsidence from 1993 to 1999 in the area where the Champlain Towers South condominium is located. But subsidence, or the gradual sinking of land, likely would not on its own cause a building to collapse, according to Wdowinski, who analyzed space-based radar data.
Miami-Dade County officials are aware of the study and are “looking into” it, Levine Cava told ABC News last Friday.
Records show structural damage, concerns over nearby construction
A structural field survey report from October 2018, which was among hundreds of pages of public documents released by the town late Sunday, said the waterproofing below the condominium’s pool deck and entrance drive was failing and causing “major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas.” The New York Times first reported the news.
In a November 2018 email, also released by the town, a Surfside building official, Ross Prieto, told the then-town manager that he had met with the Champlain Towers South residents and “it went very well.”
“The response was very positive from everyone in the room,” Prieto wrote in the email. “All main concerns over their forty year recertification process were addressed. This particular building is not due to begin their forty year until 2021 but they have decided to start the process early which I wholeheartedly endorse and wish that this trend would catch on with other properties.”
A former resident, Susanna Alvarez, told ABC News on Sunday that Prieto said during the 2018 meeting that the condominium was “not in bad shape” — a sentiment that appears to conflict with the structural field survey report penned five weeks earlier.
ABC News obtained a copy of the minutes from the November 2018 meeting of the Champlain Towers South Condo Association, which stated that Prieto had reviewed the structural field survey report and “it appears the building is in very good shape.” NPR was the first to report the news.
Prieto has not responded to ABC News’ repeated requests for comment. He is no longer employed by the town of Surfside. He has been placed on a “leave of absence” from his current post as a building inspector in nearby Doral, according to a statement from the city on Tuesday.
When asked on Monday whether Prieto misled residents during the 2018 meeting, Surfside’s mayor told ABC News: “We’re going to have to find out.”
Meanwhile, Surfside officials and engineers are concerned that recent construction of a nearby residential building may have contributed to instability at the Champlain Towers South and, according to one expert, could have potentially been “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Construction of a neighboring building can certainly impact the conditions, particularly the foundation for an existing building,” Ben Schafer, a structural engineering professor and director of the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told ABC News on Tuesday. “A critical flaw or damage must have already existed in the Champlain Towers, but neighboring new construction could be the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ in terms of a precipitating event.”
According to media reports from that time, the construction began in 2015 when Terra, a South Florida development firm, started erecting Eighty Seven Park, an 18-story luxury condominium in Miami Beach, across the street from the Champlain Towers South. The project caused such a raucous for residents that Mara Chouela, a board member of the Champlain Towers South Condo Association, reached out to Surfside officials in January 2019, according to records released by the town.
“We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close,” Chouela wrote in an email. “The terra project on Collins and 87 are digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building. We just wanted to know if any of tour officials could come by and check.”
Chouela received an email back from Prieto, saying: “There is nothing for me to check.”
“The best course of action is to have someone monitor the fence, pool and adjacent areas for damage or hire a consultant to monitor these areas as they are the closest to the construction,” Prieto added.
Surfside Commissioner Eliana Salzhauer told ABC News on Tuesday that Prieto’s response to Chouela reflects “laziness” from someone who was “too comfortable” in his job.
“The residents should have a place to go for their complaints,” Salzhauer said. “They should have been treated seriously.”
“What happened here is a wake-up call for every small town and for every government,” she added.
Residents and board members continued to complain about the project next door for several months, mostly about styrofoam and dirt from the construction site ending up on the Champlain Towers South pool deck and plaza, according to documents released by the town.
A spokesperson for 8701 Collins Development LLC, a joint venture that was established by Terra and other developers involved in the project, told ABC News in a statement Wednesday that they “are confident that the construction of 87 Park did not cause or contribute to the collapse that took place in Surfside on June 24, 2021.”
Jose “Pepe” Diaz, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission, told ABC News on Tuesday that he would not speculate what role neighboring construction had on the partial collapse but said officials will investigate it.
Lawsuits against the Champlain Towers South Condo Association have already been filed on behalf of residents, alleging the partial collapse could have been avoided and that the association knew or should have known about the structural damage.
A spokesperson for the Champlain Towers South Condo Association said they cannot comment on pending litigation but that their “focus remains on caring for our friends and neighbors during this difficult time.”
“We continue to work with city, state, and local officials in their search and recovery efforts, and to understand the causes of this tragedy,” the spokesperson told ABC News in a statement Monday. “Our profound thanks go out to all of emergency rescue personnel — professionals and volunteers alike — for their tireless efforts.”
On Wednesday, two law firms announced they’d filed a lawsuit and emergency motion requesting that a representative of the impacted families be allowed at the site for observation and for permission to use a drone to document evidence.
“The families have no idea whether it is being documented as they peel through that collapse, layer by layer, have no idea what is going to happen to that evidence, and they deserve a voice and a role in this process,” Robert Mongeluzzi of Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky, which filed the documents along with the law firm Morgan & Morgan, said during a press briefing.
“We believe that we could give the families a voice and a set of eyes without impairing the critical work of the search and rescue teams that are there, and without affecting at all the investigating agencies that are there,” he added.
The documents were filed on behalf of the family of Harry Rosenberg, a resident of Champlain Towers South who is missing in the collapse, along with his daughter and son-in-law, the attorneys said.
“They do not want this to be about them,” Mongeluzzi said. “They have merely filed this so that we can file this motion on behalf of all the families, all the victims, so that they could start to get answers about why their loved ones are missing.”
The law firms expect the motion to be heard in Miami-Dade County court on Thursday, Mongeluzzi said.
ABC News’ Judy Block, Lucien Bruggeman, Alexandra Faul, Matt Foster, Kate Hodgson, T.J. Holmes, Joshua Hoyos, Soorin Kim, Sarah Kolinovsky, Victor Oquendo, Stephanie Ramos, Laura Romero and Stephanie Wash contributed to this report.
(SURFSIDE, Fla.) — From the mother of a teenage boy rescued from the rubble to a couple married for 59 years, more information is emerging about the victims of a partial building collapse in Surfside, Florida.
At least 18 people have been confirmed dead and 145 others remain unaccounted for since the Champlain Towers South, a 12-story oceanfront condominium, partially collapsed before dawn last Thursday. A massive search and rescue mission is still underway, as officials hold out hope that more survivors will be found in the wreckage.
Local police and relatives have identified several of the victims.
Stacie Dawn Fang, 54
Stacie Dawn Fang, who lived in apartment No. 1002 of the Champlain Towers South, was the first victim to be identified in the tragedy.
The 54-year-old mother and her 15-year-old son, Jonah Handler, were both pulled from the rubble alive just hours after the partial collapse. A man walking his dog near the scene spotted Handler in the debris and alerted first responders.
“We could hear someone screaming, yelling, making noise,” Nicholas Balboa told ABC News. “He was putting his hands up through the rubble, saying, ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ That’s when I signaled firefighters to get over here.”
The mother and son were transported to a local hospital, where Fang later died. Her identity was released by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Saturday.
“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Stacie,” Fang’s family told ABC News in a statement. “The members of the Fang and Handler family would like to express our deepest appreciation for the outpouring of sympathy, compassion and support we have received. The many heartfelt words of encouragement and love have served as a much needed source of strength during this devastating time. On behalf of Stacie’s son, Jonah, we ask you now to please respect our privacy to grieve and to try to help each other heal.”
Antonio and Gladys Lozano, 83 and 79
The body of 83-year-old Antonio Lozano was recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Thursday, while the body of his 79-year-old wife, Gladys Lozano, was recovered Friday. The couple lived in apartment No. 903 of the Champlain Towers South. Their identities were released by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Saturday.
Antonio and Gladys Lozano were married for 59 years and always use to spar over who would die first, with neither willing to live without the other, according to the couple’s grandson, Brian Lozano.
“It’s tragic but it’s strangely unsettling that I have peace knowing they would constantly play argue about who would pass first,” Brian Lozano told ABC News in a statement. “But in the end… they got what they both wanted. Each other.”
“Both were avid donators to non profit organizations especially to cancer since my grandmother lost her mother to the sickness,” he added. “Always providing for anyone who’s in need or just to spark a smile on someone’s face. Their souls were truly beautiful and are now blessed.”
The couple’s son, Sergio Lozano, said he lived in the tower across from his parents and had dinner with them the night before the deadly disaster. He said he heard a rumble at around 1 a.m. local time and got out of bed to look out on the balcony of his unit.
“I tell [my wife], ‘It’s not there,'” Sergio Lozano told Miami ABC affiliate WPLG. “And she’s yelling, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘My parents’ apartment is not there, it’s gone!’ and I just ran downstairs.”
Manuel LaFont, 54
Manuel LaFont’s body was recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Friday and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Saturday. The 54-year-old lived in apartment No. 804 of the Champlain Towers South.
LaFont shared two children with his ex-wife, a 13-year-old daughter and a 10-year-old son. LaFont’s ex-wife, Adriana LaFont, said she picked up the kids from his apartment on Wednesday night, just hours before the collapse.
Leon Oliwkowicz and Christina Beatriz Elvira, 80 and 74
The body of 80-year-old Leon Oliwkowicz was recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Saturday and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Sunday. The body of his 74-year-old wife, Christina Beatriz Elvira, was recovered and identified on Sunday.
The couple lived in apartment No. 704 of the Champlain Towers South, their daughter told WPLG.
Anna Ortiz and Luis Bermudez, 46 and 26
The bodies of 46-year-old Anna Ortiz and her 26-year-old son, Luis Bermudez, were recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Saturday and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Sunday.
Their family told ABC News that the mother and son were found together and that they are certain she ran to be by his side, saying she was “always his protector.”
Anna Ortiz’s sister, Nicole Ortiz, said it was agonizing not knowing whether her loved ones were still trapped and in pain.
“I didn’t have the certainty. Are they alive or dead? Now I know they are OK,” Nicole Ortiz told ABC News.
Anna Ortiz’s mother, Josefina Enriquez, said she was a wonderful mom.
“It’s hard. I know this will take time,” Josefina Enriquez told ABC News. “I know she left with her son, and they had a beautiful, amazing life.”
“Those are the memories that will stick,” she added. “Their love for each other — that’s what I walk away with.”
Two other relatives who were in the apartment at the time of the partial collapse remain unaccounted for, according to the family.
Frank Kleiman, 55
Frank Kleiman’s body was recovered from the wreckage by first responders and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Monday. He was 55.
Kleiman had just gotten married to Anna Ortiz and they lived with her son, Luis Bermudez, in the Champlain Towers South.
His brother, Jay Kleiman, and their mother, Nancy Kress Levin, were on the same floor when the building partially collapsed and are still missing, according to The Associated Press.
Marcus Joseph Guara, 52
The body of 52-year-old Marcus Joseph Guara was recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Saturday and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Monday.
Guara lived in the Champlain Towers South with his 41-year-old wife, Ana, and their two daughters, 11-year-old Lucia and 4-year-old Emma. They are still missing, according to the WPLG.
Michael David Altman, 50
Michael David Altman’s body was recovered from the wreckage by first responders and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Monday. He was 50.
Altman lived in apartment No. 1101 of the Champlain Towers South, according to WPLG.
Hilda Noriega, 92
The body of 92-year-old Hilda Noriega was recovered from the wreckage by first responders on Tuesday and identified by the Miami-Dade Police Department on Wednesday.
Noriega lived in the Champlain Towers South, according to her grandson, Michael Noriega, who had told ABC News on Monday that their family was holding out hope she would be alive. The family had spotted a birthday card and photographs belonging to her amid the rubble, just feet away from where they were praying together.
ABC News’ Matt Foster, Kate Hodgson, Stephanie Ramos, Gina Sunseri and Stephanie Wash contributed to this report.
(MURFREESBORO, Tenn.) — An intense around-the-clock search for a missing 6-year-old Tennessee girl involved multiple law enforcement agencies, drones and airplanes equipped with thermal imaging, but ended when a deputy dog sniffed out the child allegedly being hidden in a rural shed by her father, authorities said.
Fred, a bloodhound member of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office, is being showered with praise for rescuing the girl authorities allege was kidnapped by her dad.
“He licked her face and she gave him a big hug,” K-9 Deputy Richard Tidwell of the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office said of the scene that unfolded Friday in Pea Ridge, Tennessee, about 100 miles northeast of Nashville near the Tennessee-Kentucky border.
The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office launched a search for the girl, Kinzleigh Reeder, on June 21 after the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, which had been granted custody of the child a few days earlier, reported her missing when they could not locate her, officials said.
DeKalb County Sheriff Patrick Rey said in a statement that the girl was last seen on May 26 by a relative who was given temporary custody of her after the child’s 34-year-old father, Nicholas Reeder, was arrested in March on charges of child abuse and neglect.
The girl went missing soon after her father was released from jail and allowed by the Department of Children’s Services to stay at the home where his daughter was living, Rey said.
He said the search led investigators to the Pea Ridge area, where Nicholas Reeder owns property.
“Throughout the search for Kinzleigh Reeder, there have been hundreds of manpower hours utilized in the diligent search for Nicholas Reeder and the missing child,” Rey said. “Throughout the investigation, there have been airplanes equipped with thermal imaging and drones used in the Pea Ridge Community.”
The big break in the search came on Friday evening after a drone being operated by Rutherford County Fire & Rescue personnel found evidence that led them to suspect the father and daughter were hiding somewhere on the Pea Ridge property Nicholas Reeder owns.
That’s when authorities called in Fred the bloodhound.
“The bloodhound was able to locate a scent that led to an outbuilding located on the property,” Rey said, adding that the dog had earlier been given an item belonging to the father to smell.
Tidwell added that Fred sniffed the door and doorknob of the shed “then sat down indicating he found the father.”
Rutherford County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Holloway said the shed’s door was barricaded and that pieces of metal were covering the windows.
“We made entry into the building and discovered the suspect and child in the back of the shed behind blankets that were hanging from a makeshift clothesline,” Holloway said in a statement.
Rey added that there was little ventilation in the small shed and barely any food or water for the child. He said it appeared the father and daughter had been using a bucket to urinate and defecate in.
The rescued girl was turned over to the custody of the Department of Children’s Services.
Nicholas Reeder was arrested on new charges of child abuse or neglect. He was also arrested on warrants for failure to appear at a previous court hearing and custodial interference.
He was jailed on $175,000 bond, officials said. It was unclear if Reeder has hired an attorney.
Tidwell said Fred’s good deed did not go unrewarded. He said Fred was given his favorite chicken dinner to feast on as well as an extra treat of pizza crusts.
“I praised him and loved on him,” Tidwell said. “I pulled the chicken reward out of my pocket. He ate the chicken and wanted to meet other people as if to say, ‘Look what I’ve done.'”
(PHILADELPHIA) — Andrea Constand, the woman at the center of Bill Cosby’s 2018 sexual assault trial, has called the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s decision to overturn the comedian’s conviction “disappointing” and “of concern.”
In a joint statement with her attorneys Dolores Troiani and Bebe Kivitz, Constand noted that by allowing Cosby to go free, the court may have inadvertently discouraged survivors of sexual assault from “reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant.”
The decision could also “force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action,” the statement continues.
“We remain grateful to those women who came forward to tell their stories, to [District Attorney] Kevin Steele and the excellent prosecutors who achieve a conviction at trial, despite the ultimate outcome which resulted from a procedural technicality, and we urge all victims to have their voices heard,” the statement concludes. “We do not intend to make any further comment.”
The court vacated Cosby’s indecent assault conviction after agreeing last year to hear two points in Cosby’s appeal.
Cosby, 83, was sentenced in 2018 to three to 10 years in prison after he was convicted of three counts of indecent assault for sexually assaulting and drugging Constand in 2004.
The state’s Supreme Court found that Cosby should not have been charged or sentenced in the 2018 Constand case due to the fact that he had previously made a deal with a prosecutor in Constand’s 2005 civil lawsuit.
Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after serving over two years of his sentence.
Read more about how the world is reacting to the development:
Victoria Valentino, one of Cosby’s accusers
Accuser Victoria Valentino said she was “absolutely in shock” by the news of Cosby’s conviction being overturned while appearing on ABC News Live.
“I’m absolutely in shock … my stomach is lurching and I am deeply distressed about the injustice of the whole thing,” she said, calling Cosby “a sociopath” and “a serial rapist.”
“I’m absolutely in shock…My stomach is lurching and I am deeply distressed about the injustice of the whole thing,” Bill Cosby accuser Victoria Valentino says of his release from prison. https://t.co/yuM413mOS1pic.twitter.com/y4gmnY2pnd
Janice Baker Kinney, one of Cosby’s accusers
Janice Baker Kinney, who is also one of Cosby’s 60 accusers, said she too was “shocked” by the court’s decision.
Bill Cosby accuser Janice Baker Kinney: “I’m shocked..,just one little legalese can overturn this when so many people came forward, so many women have told their truths.” https://t.co/yuM413mOS1pic.twitter.com/zFFxCsgzP6
“Just one little legalese can overturn this when so many people came forward,” she said. “So many women have told their truth, and this serial rapist gets to go home today is just stunning to me.”
Phylicia Rashad
Cosby’s “The Cosby Show” co-star Phylicia Rashad, who played his onscreen wife, reacted to the news, writing, “FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted- a miscarriage of justice is corrected!”
Gloria Allred
Attorney Gloria Allred commended those who “bravely testified” in Cosby’s criminal cases.
“Despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, this was an important fight for justice,” she said. “Even though the court overturned the conviction on technical grounds, it did not vindicate Bill Cosby’s conduct, and it should not be interpreted as a statement or a finding that he did not engage in the acts of which he has been accused.”
Amber Tamblyn
In a tweet, actress Amber Tamblyn said she was “furious” to hear the news. “I personally know women who this man drugged and raped while unconscious. Shame on the court and this decision. #TimesUp #MeToo,” she wrote.
Tamblyn followed that up by voicing that there’s still more work to be done, adding, “Our justice system MUST change.”
I don’t want to hear anything about how cancel culture ruined men’s lives during the MeToo era reckoning for women and survivors. How we went too far. Today’s news that Cosby’s conviction is being overturned is proof we haven’t gone far enough. Our justice system MUST change.
Lisa Bloom
Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who represents three of the Cosby accusers, reacted to the news on Twitter, saying she and her clients are “disgusted that he is a free man today.” Bloom called the decision to release Cosby a “kick in the gut to victims and their advocates.”
“Every day I fight for sexual assault victims and have to advise them of the ugly truth: the system still massively favors the rich and powerful,” she tweeted. “You need a superhuman level of strength and courage. Luckily many victims have it.”
The 3 Bill Cosby accusers I represent and I are disgusted that he is a free man today.
He is not released because he is innocent.
He is released because a prosecutor promised him years ago that he would not be brought to justice, without even making a deal for him to do time.
Tarana Burke, #MeToo founder, and Dani Ayers, CEO of me too.
Tarana Burke and Dani Ayers issued a joint statement reflecting on what the Cosby news means for survivors of sexual violence. Read the full statement below:
“Today’s decision is not only triggering for those who have experienced sexual violence and its emotional and physical consequences; it is a miscarriage of what little accountability survivors are afforded by our legal system. While many will use this moment to focus on single, bad actors, this decision to overturn Bill Cosby’s conviction reminds us that we are forced to contend with a flawed criminal-legal system that was created in support of patriarchal standards, with the goal to maintain dominance, power and control.”
“Almost four years ago, the hashtag #MeToo went viral and ignited a global movement that gave rise to a new wave of stories of sexual violence, powered by solidarity, empathy and seeking healing for generations of survivors. We created me too. International to undergird the work of this global movement and interrupt and ultimately end sexual violence. It is within that work that we prioritize the disruption of dominant narratives that will frame the abuser as the victim, and the abused as the villain.
“Our focus has been and will remain on survivors. We stand strong in solidarity with them, center the need for healing for all who are impacted by this news, and reject the damaging and diminishing stories that will emerge from this decision about who the survivors are and what they deserve.”
(PHILADELPHIA) — Bill Cosby was released from prison Wednesday after his conviction on sexual assault charges was overturned by Pennsylvania’s highest court.
The 83-year-old Cosby walked out of the State Correctional Institution Phoenix in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Wednesday afternoon, officials told ABC News.
Cosby’s publicist, Andrew Wyatt, told ABC News earlier Wednesday that he was going to pick Cosby up at the prison.
Aerial footage from Philadelphia ABC station WPVI showed Cosby getting out of a car at his Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, mansion wearing a maroon T-shirt and baggy trousers. He flashed a peace sign as people helped him walk into his home.
Cosby later emerged from his home and walked to the end of his driveway where he stood with Wyatt and his lawyers as they addressed the media. Cosby smiled as reporters asked him to respond to no longer being incarcerated, but he declined to speak.
“What we saw today was justice, justice for all Americans,” Wyatt said.
The actor released a statement on Twitter, writing, “I have never changed my stance nor my story. I have always maintained my innocence. Thank you to all my fans, supporters and friends who stood by me through this ordeal. Special thanks to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for upholding the rule of law.”
One of Cosby’s appellate attorneys, Jennifer Bonjean, said she and the rest of Cosby’s legal team were “thrilled” to have him home.
“He served three years of an unjust sentence. He did it with dignity, principal and he was a mentor to other inmates,” Bonjean said. “He was really, as I say, doing the time. The time was not doing him.”
She also thanked the state Supreme Court for demonstrating “they were impervious to the court of public opinion, which frankly the lower courts were not.”
Cosby was sentenced in September 2018 to three to 10 years in state prison for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting former Temple University employee Andrea Constand in 2004. Cosby served about three years of his sentence.
“Today’s majority decision regarding Bill Cosby is not only disappointing but of concern in that it may discourage those who seek justice for sexual assault in the criminal justice system from reporting or participating in the prosecution of the assailant or may force a victim to choose between filing either a criminal or civil action,” Constand and her lawyers said in a statement.
Last year, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear two points in Cosby’s appeal to overturn his 2018 sexual assault conviction.
In a ruling released Wednesday, the state Supreme Court concluded that Cosby’s prosecution should never have occurred due to a deal the comedian cut with former Montgomery County prosecutor Bruce Castor, who agreed not to criminally prosecute Cosby if he gave a deposition in a civil case brought against him by Constand.
During that deposition, Cosby made incriminating statements that Castor’s successor, Kevin R. Steele, used to charge Cosby in 2015.
Constand said in her statement that the decision to overturn the conviction resulted from “a procedural technicality.”
Castor is the same lawyer who went on to represent former President Donald Trump during the ex-president’s second impeachment trial earlier this year.
“The discretion vested in our Commonwealth’s prosecutors, however vast, does not mean that its exercise is free of the constraints of due process,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices wrote in their 79-page decision.
“When an unconditional charging decision is made publicly and with the intent to induce action and reliance by the defendant, and when the defendant does so to his detriment (and in some instances upon the advice of counsel), denying the defendant the benefit of that decision is an affront to fundamental fairness, particularly when it results in a criminal prosecution that was foregone for more than a decade,” the justices wrote.
The decision went on to say Cosby was the victim of an unconstitutional “coercive bait-and-switch.”
Believing he had immunity from criminal prosecution, Cosby testified during four days of depositions by Constand’s attorneys, and the civil lawsuit was settled for more than $3 million in 2006.
“As a practical matter, the moment that Cosby was charged criminally, he was harmed: all that he had forfeited earlier, and the consequences of that forfeiture in the civil case, were for naught,” the justices wrote.
Cosby cannot be retried on the criminal charges.
“He was found guilty by a jury and now goes free on a procedural issue that is irrelevant to the facts of the crime,” Steele said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
Steele commended Constand “for her bravery in coming forward and remaining steadfast throughout this long ordeal, as well as all of the other women who have shared similar experiences.”
“My hope is that this decision will not dampen the reporting of sexual assaults by victims,” Steele said. “Prosecutors in my office will continue to follow the evidence wherever and to whomever it leads. We still believe that no one is above the law — including those who are rich, famous and powerful.”
In an interview with KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia, Castor said he was “not surprised” by the state Supreme Court’s decision.
“I can only ever recall it happening once before in a case that the prosecutor’s behavior was so egregious that the Supreme Court threw the case out and didn’t remand for a new trial,” Castor told the radio station. “So it is rare, but what happened to Mr. Cosby was really egregious and what they did to him should never happen to any American citizen at any social strata.”
Attorney Gloria Allred represented several women who testified at Cosby’s trial to bolster the prosecution’s evidence of “prior bad acts” against the entertainer and to prove a pattern of practice.
“Despite the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, this was an important fight for justice,” Allred told ABC News Live. “And even though the court overturned the conviction on technical grounds, it did not vindicate Bill Cosby’s conduct and should not be interpreted as a statement or a finding that he did not engage in the acts of which he has been accused.”
Janice Baker Kinney, one of the women who testified at Cosby’s criminal trial alleging that he sexually assaulted her in 1982 when she was a 24-year-old bartender in Reno, Nevada, told ABC News Live on Wednesday she was “stunned” by the news.
“I’m shocked, and my stomach’s kind of in a knot over this,” Kinney said. “Just one little legalese can overturn this when so many people came forward, so many women have told their truths.”
Another accuser, Victoria Valentino, a former Playboy model who didn’t testify at the trial but claimed Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her when she was a young woman, told ABC News that “my stomach is lurching” upon hearing Cosby would be released.
“I am deeply distressed about the injustice of the whole thing,” Valentino said. “You know, he’s a sociopath, he’s a serial rapist.”
She said Cosby’s release came just days after she and the other Cosby accusers received a letter from Pennsylvania officials advising them that Cosby’s request for parole was denied.
Cosby, who has maintained his innocence, had his petition for early parole denied in May after corrections officials cited his refusal to participate in prison sex offender programs.
In an appeal of the conviction, Cosby’s lawyers argued that the trial judge erred in allowing Cosby’s prior deposition about using quaaludes during consensual sexual encounters with women in the 1970s.
Two lower courts, including a three-judge panel of Pennsylvania Superior Court jurists, had previously refused to overturn the comedian’s conviction.
Despite the deluge of accusations against him, Cosby has maintained he never engaged in nonconsensual sex.
ABC News’ Meredith Deliso contributed to this report.
(SURFSIDE, Fla.) — One week after a 12-story residential building partially collapsed in South Florida’s Miami-Dade County, at least 18 people have been confirmed dead while 145 others remain unaccounted for, officials said.
The massive search and rescue operation entered its eighth day on Thursday as crews continued to carefully comb through the pancaked pile of debris in hopes of finding survivors. The partial collapse occurred around 1:15 a.m. local time on June 24 at the Champlain Towers South condominium in the small, beachside town of Surfside, about 6 miles north of Miami Beach. Approximately 55 of the oceanfront complex’s 136 units were destroyed, according to Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Assistant Chief Raide Jadallah.
Among the bodies most recently pulled from the rubble were two children, ages 4 and 10, according to Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
“Any loss of life — especially given the unexpected, unprecedented nature of this event — is a tragedy. But the loss of our children is too great to bear,” Levine Cava said during a press conference in Surfside on Wednesday evening. “We’re now standing united once again with this terrible new revelation that children are the victims as well.”
All the victims recovered so far have died from “blunt force injuries” due to the collapse, Dr. Emma Lew, director of the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department, told ABC News.
Meanwhile, 139 people who were living or staying in the condominium at the time of the disaster have been accounted for and are safe, according to Levine Cava, who stressed that the numbers are “very fluid” and “continue to change.” Officials previously were including the number of deceased among those accounted for but are now separating the figures.
Concerns about remaining structure halt search and rescue efforts
Search and rescue efforts were paused early Thursday morning due to concerns about the stability of the remaining structure and the potential danger it poses to the crews. Structural engineers are on site monitoring the situation as officials evaluate possible options and determine the next steps, according to Levine Cava.
“We’re doing everything that we can to ensure that the safety of our first responders is paramount and to continue our search and rescue operations as soon as it is safe to do so,” she said at a press conference in Surfside on Thursday morning.
Officials were unable to provide a timeline for when the urgent operation will resume.
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue Chief Alan Cominsky told reporters that crews observed a shift of 6 to 12 inches in a large column hanging from the still-standing structure as well as some slight movement in the concrete floor slabs just after 2 a.m. local time, prompting concerns that the rest of the condominium could collapse.
Earlier, police officers on site had told ABC News that rescuers reported hearing cracks and were investigating the stability of the building.
The structure was cleared by crews last week, and all search and rescue resources have since been shifted to focusing on the pile of rubble. But the two sites are side-by-side and the remaining building has posed challenges for the hundreds of first responders trying locate any survivors or human remains in the wreckage.
One area of the site had to be roped off on Tuesday due to falling debris. Then on Wednesday, officials said crews were no longer entering the remaining structure because it was considered unstable.
Poor weather conditions — from downpours to lightning storms — have also forced the crews to temporarily halt their round-the-clock efforts in recent days.
Over the past week, crews have cut a vast trench through the pile of rubble to aid in their search as they try to tunnel through the wreckage and listen for sounds. As they work to reach the bottom of the pile, cameras placed inside show voids and air pockets where people could be trapped, according to officials.
Rescuers are using various assets, equipment and technology, including specially trained dogs that are searching for signs of life, underground sonar systems that can detect victims and crane trucks that can remove huge slabs of concrete from the pile. Crews have removed almost 1,400 tons of debris from the site so far, officials said.
Rescuers are each working 12-hour shifts at a time and the conditions on the pile are “tough” as they risk their lives in hopes of saving others amid heat, humidity and rain, according to Cominsky. But “spirits are high” and they are still “hoping for a positive outcome,” he told reporters.
“We’re exhausting every avenue here,” Cominsky said during the press conference on Wednesday morning. “But it’s a very, very dangerous situation and I can’t understate that.”
Some of the first responders are members of the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue’s urban search and rescue team, Florida Task Force-1, which is part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Urban Search and Rescue Response System and has been deployed to disasters across the country and around the world. Search and rescue teams from Israel and Mexico have also joined the efforts in Surfside.
Col. Golan Vach, head of a unit of the Israel Defense Forces that specializes in search and rescue operations, arrived in Surfside with his team early Sunday and has been on scene ever since.
“We find everyday new spaces, new tunnels that we can penetrate into the site,” Vach told ABC News on Wednesday.
The ongoing operation in Surfside is the largest-ever deployment of task force resources in Florida’s history for a non-hurricane event. But as the Atlantic hurricane season ramps up, officials are monitoring storms in the region in case some resources deployed to Surfside are needed elsewhere, according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Meanwhile, Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett has acknowledged that there have been questions from families about when the efforts will transition from search and rescue to recovery.
“This is going to go on until we get everybody out of there,” Burkett said at the press conference on Wednesday morning.
Although officials have continued to express hope that more people will be found alive, no survivors have been discovered in the rubble of the building since the morning it partially collapsed. Bodies, however, have been uncovered throughout the site, which crews have categorized into grids, Cominsky said.
Officials have asked families of the missing to provide DNA samples and unique characteristics of their loved ones, such as tattoos and scars, to help identify those found in the wreckage. Detectives are also in the process of conducting an audit of the list of those accounted and unaccounted for, according to Levine Cava.
Shortly after the building partially collapsed, first responders heard cries for help from a woman trapped in a lower level that was now inside the parking garage. But a wall of concrete and other debris stood in their way, one rescue worker who asked to remain anonymous told Miami ABC affiliate WPLG.
“The first thing I remember is thumping on the wall,” the rescuer recalled. “And then I remember her just talking, ‘I’m here, get me out! Get me out!'”
“We were continuously talking to her,” he added. “‘Honey, we got you. We’re going to get to you.'”
Crews never abandoned their effort to reach the woman but the rescue worker said he later learned that she did not survive.
Cominsky confirmed the report during the press conference on Thursday morning, saying crews are “trying to do the best we can” but that “unfortunately we didn’t have success with that.”
Biden meets with officials, rescuers, families in Surfside
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden traveled to Surfside on Thursday to tour the scene of the disaster and meet with officials, first responders, search and rescue teams, as well as families of the victims.
“I just want you to know that we understand,” President Biden told a group of first responders. “What you’re doing now is just hard as hell. Even psychologically. And I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Addressing reporters Thursday afternoon, Biden said he wanted to send a message to the impacted families that the nation is “here for you.”
“We’ll be in touch with a lot of these families continuing through this process. But there’s much more to be done. We’re ready to do it,” he said.
Prior to his remarks, Biden talked with the families of the victims for nearly three hours.
“I thought it’s important to speak to every single person who wanted to speak to me,” Biden said. “I sat with one woman who had just lost her husband and her little baby boy. Didn’t know what to do. I sat with another family that lost almost an entire family — cousins, brothers, sisters.”
The president said first responders are hopeful they will recover survivors, though acknowledged that the families are “very realistic.”
“They know that the chances are, as each day goes by, diminish slightly. But, at a minimum, they want to recover the bodies,” he said.
Last week, the president approved an emergency declaration in Florida and ordered federal assistance to supplement state and local response efforts in the wake of the partial building collapse.
The Miami-Dade County mayor told reporters that Biden’s visit “will have no impact on what happens at this site.”
“The search and rescue operation will continue as soon as it is safe to do so,” Levine Cava said at the press conference on Thursday morning. “The only reason for this pause is concerns about the standing structure.”
Federal agency that investigated collapse of Twin Towers joins probe
The cause of the partial collapse to a building that has withstood decades of hurricanes remains unknown. The Miami-Dade Police Department is leading an investigation into the incident.
The Miami-Dade County mayor told ABC News last Friday that there was no evidence of foul play so far but that “nothing’s ruled out.”
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said she plans “to request that our Grand Jury look at what steps we can take to safeguard our residents without jeopardizing any scientific, public safety or potential criminal investigations.”
“I know from personally speaking with engineers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology that their investigation to determine exactly how and why the building collapsed will take a long time,” Rundle said in a statement Tuesday. “However, this is a matter of extreme public importance, and as the state attorney elected to keep this community safe, I will not wait.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has activated its national construction safety team to investigate the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers South. The federal agency investigated the collapse of the so-called Twin Towers in New York City after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The probe in Surfside will be a “fact-finding, not fault-finding” and one that could take years, according to the agency’s director, Dr. James Olthoff.
“It will take time, possibly a couple of years, but we will not stop until we have determined the likely cause of this tragedy,” Olthoff said during the press conference in Surfside on Wednesday evening.
What went wrong
Built in the 1980s, the Champlain Towers South was up for its 40-year recertification when it partially collapsed, according to Surfside officials.
The Champlain Towers South Condo Association was preparing to start a new construction project to make updates to the building, which had been through extensive inspections, according to Kenneth Direktor, a lawyer for the association. Direktor told ABC News last Thursday that the construction plans had already been submitted to the town but the only work that had begun was on the roof.
Direktor noted that he hadn’t been warned of any structural issues with the building or about the land it was built on. He said there was water damage to the complex, but that is common for oceanfront properties and wouldn’t have caused the partial collapse.
A 2020 study conducted by Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University’s Institute of Environment in Miami, found signs of land subsidence from 1993 to 1999 in the area where the Champlain Towers South condominium is located. But subsidence, or the gradual sinking of land, likely would not on its own cause a building to collapse, according to Wdowinski, who analyzed space-based radar data.
Miami-Dade County officials are aware of the study and are “looking into” it, Levine Cava told ABC News last Friday.
A structural field survey report from October 2018, which was among hundreds of pages of public documents released by the town late Sunday, said the waterproofing below the condominium’s pool deck and entrance drive was failing and causing “major structural damage to the concrete structural slab below these areas.” The New York Times first reported the news.
In a November 2018 email, also released by the town, a Surfside building official, Ross Prieto, told the then-town manager that he had met with the Champlain Towers South residents and “it went very well.”
“The response was very positive from everyone in the room,” Prieto wrote in the email. “All main concerns over their forty year recertification process were addressed. This particular building is not due to begin their forty year until 2021 but they have decided to start the process early which I wholeheartedly endorse and wish that this trend would catch on with other properties.”
A former resident, Susanna Alvarez, told ABC News on Sunday that Prieto said during the 2018 meeting that the condominium was “not in bad shape” — a sentiment that appears to conflict with the structural field survey report penned five weeks earlier.
ABC News obtained a copy of the minutes from the November 2018 meeting of the Champlain Towers South Condo Association, which stated that Prieto had reviewed the structural field survey report and “it appears the building is in very good shape.” NPR was the first to report the news.
Prieto has not responded to ABC News’ repeated requests for comment. He is no longer employed by the town of Surfside. He has been placed on a “leave of absence” from his current post as a building inspector in nearby Doral, according to a statement from the city on Tuesday.
When asked on Monday whether Prieto misled residents during the 2018 meeting, Surfside’s mayor told ABC News: “We’re going to have to find out.”
Meanwhile, Surfside officials and engineers are concerned that recent construction of a nearby residential building may have contributed to instability at the Champlain Towers South and, according to one expert, could have potentially been “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Construction of a neighboring building can certainly impact the conditions, particularly the foundation for an existing building,” Ben Schafer, a structural engineering professor and director of the Ralph S. O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told ABC News on Tuesday. “A critical flaw or damage must have already existed in the Champlain Towers, but neighboring new construction could be the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ in terms of a precipitating event.”
According to media reports from that time, the construction began in 2015 when Terra, a South Florida development firm, started erecting Eighty Seven Park, an 18-story luxury condominium in Miami Beach, across the street from the Champlain Towers South. The project caused such a raucous for residents that Mara Chouela, a board member of the Champlain Towers South Condo Association, reached out to Surfside officials in January 2019, according to records released by the town.
“We are concerned that the construction next to Surfside is too close,” Chouela wrote in an email. “The terra project on Collins and 87 are digging too close to our property and we have concerns regarding the structure of our building. We just wanted to know if any of tour officials could come by and check.”
Chouela received an email back from Prieto, saying: “There is nothing for me to check.”
“The best course of action is to have someone monitor the fence, pool and adjacent areas for damage or hire a consultant to monitor these areas as they are the closest to the construction,” Prieto added.
Residents and board members continued to complain about the project next door for several months, mostly about styrofoam and dirt from the construction site ending up on the Champlain Towers South pool deck and plaza, according to documents released by the town.
A spokesperson for 8701 Collins Development LLC, a joint venture that was established by Terra and other developers involved in the project, told ABC News in a statement Wednesday that they “are confident that the construction of 87 Park did not cause or contribute to the collapse that took place in Surfside on June 24, 2021.”
Another expert, forensic structural engineer Joel Figueroa-Vallines, said that because Eighty Seven Park is “lower in elevation” than the Champlain Towers South, there is a possibility that the construction of the newer building could be cause for concern. But he emphasized that more evidence is still needed.
“It’s almost important and necessary to not discard anything so early on that could potentially be a consideration,” Figueroa-Vallines, founder and president of SEP, an Orlando-based structural engineering firm, told ABC News on Wednesday.
Mehrooz Zamanzadeh, a Pittsburgh-based corrosion engineering expert, told ABC News on Wednesday that any cracks and spalling on the Champlain Towers South should also be examined to determine whether the vibrations from the construction next door played any role in the structural integrity of the condominium.
Regardless, Zamanzadeh said the accelerated deterioration and corrosion of the Champlain Towers South was a critical factor in the partial collapse. He called for mandated corrosion inspections of buildings as well as a recertification process shorter than the town’s current 40-year term.
Jose “Pepe” Diaz, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission, told ABC News on Tuesday that he would not speculate what role neighboring construction had on the partial collapse but said officials will investigate it.
Mounting lawsuits in wake of disaster
A slew of lawsuits against the Champlain Towers South Condo Association have already been filed on behalf of survivors and victims, alleging the partial collapse could have been avoided and that the association knew or should have known about the structural damage.
A spokesperson for the Champlain Towers South Condo Association said they cannot comment on pending litigation but that their “focus remains on caring for our friends and neighbors during this difficult time.”
“We continue to work with city, state, and local officials in their search and recovery efforts, and to understand the causes of this tragedy,” the spokesperson told ABC News in a statement Monday. “Our profound thanks go out to all of emergency rescue personnel — professionals and volunteers alike — for their tireless efforts.”
Two law firms, Morgan & Morgan and Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky, announced Wednesday that they have filed an emergency motion — in addition to a lawsuit — requesting site inspection and evidence preservation on behalf of the family of Harry Rosenberg, a resident of the Champlain Towers South who is still missing, along with his daughter and son-in-law.
“The families have no idea whether it is being documented as they peel through that collapse, layer by layer, have no idea what is going to happen to that evidence, and they deserve a voice and a role in this process,” Robert Mongeluzzi, a Philadelphia-based attorney and founder of Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky, said during a press conference in Miami on Wednesday. “We believe that we could give the families a voice and a set of eyes without impairing the critical work of the search and rescue teams that are there, and without affecting at all the investigating agencies that are there.”
Mongeluzzi said the Rosenberg family “do not want this to be about them.”
“They have merely filed this so that we can file this motion on behalf of all the families, all the victims, so that they could start to get answers about why their loved ones are missing,” he added.
ABC News’ Faith Abubey, Judy Block, Lucien Bruggeman, Alexandra Faul, Matt Foster, Stephanie Fuerte, Justin Gomez, Kate Hodgson, T.J. Holmes, Joshua Hoyos, Soorin Kim, Sarah Kolinovsky, Josh Margolin, Victor Oquendo, Dawn Piros, Stephanie Ramos, Laura Romero and Stephanie Wash contributed to this report.
