‘It was completely preventable’: Man who lost mother and grandmother in Miami condo collapse seeks justice

Pablo Rodriguez has spent days reliving the moment he found out his mother had died. He was rushing to her home at the collapsed tower in Surfside, Florida, carrying with him a glimmer of hope that she and his grandmother might have survived. Then he saw the video.

“At that point I just completely lost it,” he says, “because I knew where my mom’s unit was, and I could see her balcony and everything just came completely crashing down. So that’s the moment that, in my mind, I was watching them die.”

Elena Blasser, 64, lived on the 11th floor. Her mother, 88-year-old Elena Chavez, was staying with her at the apartment when the tragedy struck.

The pain of that moment has not dimmed in the time since, but Rodriguez, an attorney, has been driven by his grief to demand justice for his mother and grandmother, and to make sure a tragedy like this never happens again.

“I just keep thinking to myself, what would my mom be doing in this situation? That’s kind of what keeps me going. She would be doing anything she can to push first so that people are held responsible. And second, so that reform happens so that this never occurs again. Because it shouldn’t have happened. It was completely preventable.”

He has been doing everything he can to tell his mother and grandmother’s stories and ask questions he says need to be answered, often talking through his tears on television, to newspapers and anyone will listen.

The issue, he says, is one of regulation. Condominium boards, corporations run by and elected by residents of a building, are making life and death decisions about maintenance and repairs that they are not qualified to make.

“You’re asking ordinary citizens to deal with structural engineering, concrete and severe roof issues. These are things that normal people don’t deal with and don’t understand,” he tells The Independent by phone. “So even if you have an engineer that comes in and tells you, ‘Hey, this, this is going on,’ it’s difficult to understand what exactly they’re saying or how severe an issue it is.”

That is precisely what happened to his mother’s building, the Champlain Towers South condominium. There were plenty of warning signs that the building was in a state of disrepair: janitors who pointed out damage, a 2018 engineer’s report that found “major structural damage” and “abundant cracking”, and a warning from the condo board itself that the problem was getting worse.

Rodriguez says the damage was so bad at the building that it was a common topic of conversation among residents. He was a regular visitor to the building and saw it himself over the 12 years his mother lived there.

“There were cracks around the pool deck. There was water in the garage often. They would paint the building and, you know, the paint would start shipping shortly thereafter. These were things that people in the building talked about,” he says.

“Every time that we would go there and my mum would run into some of the other owners, it would be 20, 30 minutes where they were complaining about the way the building was run. Their biggest concern really was that there were certain board members that were misappropriating funds,” he says.

“They were like where are the monthly maintenance payments going because they’re not, you know they’re not going to maintenance.”

There are hundreds like Rodriquez – family members and friends of the victims of the tower collapse – who want answers.  Some have even begun legal action to get the truth. At least three lawsuits have been launched, and many more are likely to follow.

All of them hold the condo board responsible for the tragedy for missing warning signs over the years.

“No one took them seriously,” says Bob McKee, who is representing a survivor of the collapse in one lawsuit. “And so, yes, it’s egregious, if they had some knowledgeable comprehension.”

That lawsuit, filed on behalf of tower resident Steve Rosenthal, alleges that the condo association – a corporation jointly owned and run by residents and is responsible for the maintenance of the building – knew or should have known that “the entire structure was deteriorating and becoming susceptible to catastrophic loss by collapse”.

A separate wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against the association by the family of a woman who is still among the missing. Relatives of Beatriz Rodriguez Guerra are seeking damages and a trial by jury of the association’s board.

That follows a $5 million (£3.6 million) class action lawsuit filed on behalf of another survivor, Manuel Drezner, and “on behalf of all others similarly situated,” which also alleges that the association failed to “secure and safeguard the lives and property” of those who live at the building.

The official investigation into the causes of the collapse is likely to take months, if not longer. It has now been a week since the building came down in the middle of the night, and hopes of finding anyone alive in the rubble have all but vanished. The uncertainty around the search and rescue effort has put grief on pause for many families.

So far, 145 people remain unaccounted for and at least 18 people have been confirmed dead.

Among the victims identified so far were 83-year-old Antonio Lozano and his 79-year-old wife, Gladys Lozano. The two were married for 59 years and used to constantly joke about who would die first, their son told ABC News.

A family of four — Marcus Joseph Guara, 52; Anaely Rodriguez, 42; Lucia Guara; 10; and Emma Guara, 4, were recovered on Saturday.

Rodriguez knew early on that his mother and grandmother had passed, and has been in mourning since, sharing stories about them both. He talked to her every day and visited her every weekend.

“My mum was a force of nature. She was very passionate, very strong-willed, she loved to travel, and she loved her family. That was her number one priority, everything in the world was secondary to that. And we loved her. We were a very close family,” he says.

Even at 88-years-old, his grandmother was fiercely independent.

“She drove, she worked, she traveled.  She was planning on going to Turkey at the end of this year which we thought she was crazy for. But you know, now, now it’s like, I wish she were, she was here and she would be able to go on that trip and just go be crazy. It’s fine,” he says.

“She was very similar to my mother. She was very loving. Once you met either of them, you didn’t forget them. They stuck with you. They were just friendly, caring people.”

And despite all the problems at Champlain Tower, she loved living there.

“She always wanted to live on the beach. The beach was both my mom and my grandmother’s happy place. Even if it was raining, she’d sit out on the balcony just to look at the water.”