Authorities say they have solved a heartwrenching mystery featuring the “voice in the rubble” of a collapsed condo building in Surfside, Florida.
According to a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue (MDFR) report first published by CBS News on May 18, the fire department has confirmed the identity of the voice rescuers heard in what was left of the Champlain Towers South on June 24, 2021.
In the report, the fire department said the “voice in the rubble” belonged to the 36-year-old music industry executive Theresa Velasquez—not the 14-year-old Valeria Gomez Barth that USA Today claimed the voice to be. Both Valeria Barth and Theresa Velasquez were with their respective parents on the day of the collapse. Tragically, none of them survived.
“There were high emotions as many felt that the article misled the public to believe that the technical search crews burned and ultimately let a child die due to their actions,” writes Ray Jadallah, MDFR deputy fire chief of emergency operations, in the report that documents his findings after two months of investigation starting in October 2021.
Jadallah adds that some of the claims in USA Today’s article are “baseless and nonfactual.”
“We are currently reviewing the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue report. The facts and the sourcing in our story are clear. We have no additional comment at this time,” a spokesperson from Gannett, owner of USA Today, told The Epoch Times in an email.
Was She Valeria?
USA Today says it was Valeria.
“When the building fell at 1:23 a.m., the primary bedroom where Valeria and her parents were sleeping crashed through the first floor and into the garage, enveloping them in a jumble of furniture, concrete, and steel,” the USA Today article reads.
The article cited an incident recall report suggesting that the woman in the rubble told the rescue crew she was from condo unit 204, where the 14-year-old was staying with her parents before the collapse.
Yet, the MDFR report said the investigator interviewed the rescuers, who said they heard apartment 304, and it was “difficult to hear” because the woman was far from them at the time. The rescuers also “unanimously agreed that the voice was that of a woman, and not a child.”
The MDFR report adds that the woman’s articulateness under conditions of “high stress and emotion” would not match the profile of Valerya, whose uncle Sergio Barth described as a 14-year-old with a Spanish accent. It cited past experiences of rescuers and related research that suggest a bilingual person is more prone to speak their primary language when under stressful conditions.
The female, according to rescuers, spoke fluent English and was “calm and in control.”
The report said the crews found two Paratech pneumatic devices that were left behind near where the rescue team was trying to make contact with the female in the rubble. Velasquez’s remains were found about 15 feet from these devices, the report said.
“[A]bductive reasoning and taking all physical evidence into account has led us to the confident conclusion that the female voice our MDFR rescuers communicated with was that of Ms. Theresa Velasquez, and not 14-year-old Valeria Barth,” said the fire department report.
Did the Rescuers Cause a Fire?
Both the USA Today article and the MDFR report mentioned a fire that started on a mattress close to the location where the rescuers were cutting up a slab to try to get to the female buried under the rubble in the underground parking garage.
While the USA Today article did not explicitly say that the rescue workers caused the fire, it mentioned how the fire “started in the hole rescue workers were cutting with sparking tools” while they were trying to reach the woman and that the fire was on the mattress next to Valeria.
It quoted Lt. Gregory E. Roberts, who said that he was not there when the fire broke out. He told USA Today that they “could never determine the cause of the fire” and that they were “in knee-deep water, electrical hazards, fuel, cars in there, oil, debris.”
However, the MDFR report said that the first reported fire was due to “a flareup of a mattress” near where they were cutting in with a rotating metal saw, but the fire was quickly extinguished.
According to the MDFR report, a medical examiner did not find charring on the female’s remains, suggesting that the fire was not close to the female under the rubble.
Therefore, after weeks of reviewing USA Today’s claim that the fire was on a mattress next to Valeria at 1:42 p.m., the report said that the investigating supervisor could not formulate the same conclusion as the reporter and “could not support, nor substantiate the reporter’s claim based on the information, facts, and evidence provided.”
According to the MDFR report, the USA Today article caused an “undue emotional toll” on the first responders at the scene, on top of the mental anguish they had already experienced from the incident.
“This frustration,” the report says, “led the crews to dissect the article and address the nonfactual information one statement at a time during my visits.”
Closure
“Today, I can report, because of the sustained heroic efforts, the last remaining missing person has now been accounted for and identified and the family notified,” the Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said at a news conference weeks after the incident. “Through these tireless efforts, we were able to at least bring closure to all those who reported missing loved ones.”
Over a two-week period after the collapse, Jadallah briefed the families and friends of the victims who died in the collapse.
“There is no script for this. That’s why it made it so difficult, so different, and if there were a script, you wouldn’t be able to follow it,” said Jadallah in an undated statement published after the incident on Miami Dade’s website, talking about the fire department’s post-incident visits to the victim’s families and friends.
USA Today updated the story with an editor’s note on May 18: “Five months after this story published, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue released a report identifying the woman trapped under the rubble of the Champlain Towers South as Theresa Velasquez and disputing other details in the story.”
NTD has reached out to the Miami-Dade Fire Department for comments.
