LA music executive Theresa Velasquez is 95th fatality identified in Florida condo collapse
Another victim was identified in the collapse of a 12-story Florida condominium that killed at least 97 people, authorities said Saturday. The Miami-Dade Police Department said in a news release that Theresa Velasquez, 36, was a confirmed fatality in the June 24 collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo.
Velasquez's body was recovered July 8. She becomes the 95th fatality identified in the collapse, police said.
Velasquez was a Los Angeles-based executive for the Live Nation event promotion company. She had flown into Miami to visit her parents at the Surfside condo, both of whom also died in the collapse.
"Theresa was an impassioned leader at Live Nation, who elevated every project she was part of, at the same time breaking down barriers for women, and the LGBTQIA+ community," the company said in a statement. "We will always remember and honor the impact she made, and will miss her dearly."
The bodies of Julio and Angela Velasquez were recovered and identified earlier.
A GoFundMe site for the family has raised more than $52,000.
"If we do not need the financial support, we will either return this monetary support (if possible) or pay it forward to those who might need it in the aftermath of this tragedy, or to victims of similar tragedies," the site says.
The recovery effort at the condo site is slowly winding down, with perhaps one more body still buried in the rubble. Work is now shifting toward determining what caused the oceanfront condo to come down.
"At this step in the recovery process it has become increasingly difficult to identify victims, and we are relying heavily on the work of the medical examiner's office and the scientific, technical process of identifying human remains," Miami-Dade County said in a news release Saturday. "This work becomes more difficult with the passage of time although our teams are working as hard and as fast as they can."
