It was five hours after the collapse of a 13-story beachfront condominium building in Surfside, Florida, last June when rescue teams first heard a woman’s voice emerging from beneath the rubble. It was faint but quiet.
She told them she was stuck, between two mattresses or maybe between a mattress and a wall.
Rescue teams did not reach her in time, although they heard her for several more hours, fire officials said at a news conference last year. Her identity eluded investigators for months.
According to a report released this week by the Miami-Dade Fire Department, the woman was Theresa Velasquez, who was 36 at the time of her death.
She was a Los Angeles music industry director who had visited her parents at their apartment in the Champlain Towers South condominium. The three were among the 98 victims whose bodies were recovered from the collapsed building and identified, even though the mystery of the voice persisted.
“There was a high level of emotion as many felt the article misled the public into believing that the tech search crews were burned and eventually let a child die as a result of their actions,” Mr Jadallah wrote in his report, citing some of the allegations made by the article “unfounded”. and non-fact.”
A spokeswoman for Gannett, owner and publisher of USA Today, said the company was reviewing the report.
“The facts and provenance in our story are clear,” the spokeswoman, Lark-Marie Anton, said via email, refusing to answer further questions.
Rescue crew members told Mr. Jadallah that while searching for the source of the voice, it was only possible to hear it when everything else was silent.
“Even the slightest whisper from the rescue teams or sloshing in the still water denied the woman’s ability to hear,” wrote Mr. jadallah.
The voice sounded like a woman’s, not a child’s, and matched that of a native English speaker, without a trace of a Spanish accent, he said. And she never called out for her parents, as you would expect from a teenager.
There was no charring on Mrs. Velasquez, which was pulled from the rubble two weeks after the collapse, Jadallah said. Last December, according to the report, the fire service killed the families of Ms. Velasquez and Mrs. Barth informed of their conclusions.
The brother of Mrs. Velasquez, David, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. He told CBS Miami that he accepted the findings.
“There’s no way to know 100 percent,” he said, “but it seems like the logical conclusion.”
Ms. Velasquez was in a third-floor apartment with her parents, Julio and Angela, when the building collapsed and was among the 98 victims who died. She had flown to Surfside just hours before the building collapsed, The Miami Herald reported.
She lived in Los Angeles and was a music manager at Live Nation, where she was a “passionate leader,” the company said in a statement last year. In 2020, Billboard named her on a list of the top LGBTQ music executives. She was also a DJ who had toured internationally.
On social media, Ms. Velasquez captured the moments of her life, one filled with travel and time with friends.
In a eulogy at a memorial service last July, David Velasquez described his younger sister as the coolest person he’d ever met. He listed her many achievements, including degrees from Georgetown University and New York University, her talent in music, and the efforts she made to support the LGBTQ community she belonged to.
“Effortlessly cool, a planet with its own gravity where people got stuck in its orbit,” he said. “She could do everything well, an absolute force of nature.”
Johnny Diazo contributed reporting from Miami.
