Haunting Surfside mystery — ID of woman buried alive in ruins for hours — may be solved

Five hours after Champlain Towers South collapsed early in the morning on June 24, 2021, rescue dogs picked up the scent of a live victim pinned underneath the parking garage.

Rescuers made out the voice of a woman, but the voice was so faint that whispers among the crew or movement in the standing water in which the crew worked would blot out the sound of the voice.

But from the faint responses, rescuers believed the woman said that she was staying at the Surfside condominium tower with her parents.

They heard her say she was trapped between a mattress or a wall, or between two mattresses.

READ MORE: Surfside condo was ‘screaming’ as an alarming crack formed just weeks before the collapse

Rescuers were unable to reach the woman, but a new report may solve the mystery of her identity, which has hung over this tragedy like a black cloud.

Miami-Dade Fire Rescue believes that the woman whose voice was heard was Theresa Velasquez, a 36-year-old music industry executive, who had been visiting her parents from California and arrived just hours before the collapse, which would ultimately claim 98 lives.

READ MORE: She broke barriers in the music industry as LGBTQ woman. She, her parents die in Surfside

A report revealing that conclusion, first obtained by Jim DeFede at CBS4 Miami, is based on interviews with rescuers and other documentary evidence.

While firefighters and other first responders were able to pull four live people from the rubble in the hours after collapse — one of whom subsequently died — they were never able to rescue the mystery woman now believed to be Velasquez despite remaining in communication with her for several agonizing hours.

Her remains were ultimately discovered July 8, 2021. The bodies of her parents, Julio and Angela, were discovered over the following two days.

Velasquez began her music career in 2004, deejaying around clubs in Miami under the name DJ Theresa. She parlayed her early success into gigs around the world., including Barcelona’s Circuit Festival and Madrid’s SuperMartxe.

She was also inspired to study the business side of the music industry and earned a master’s degree in music business from New York University after graduating from Georgetown University. She had worked for Sony Music and SFX Entertainment and had been an executive at music event company LiveNation for the previous six years.

With DJ Hector Fonseca, she co-founded a record label in 2011 focused on LGBTQI+ artists called Audio4Play and was included in Billboard’s June 2020 Pride List of top LGBTQ music industry executives.

Speaking at a memorial service weeks after the bodies of Theresa and her parents were discovered, Theresa’s older brother, David, described her as the coolest person he had ever met.

“Effortlessly cool. A planet with her own gravity where people got caught in her orbit,” he said. “She could do everything well, an absolute force of nature.”

The Fire Rescue report was authored by Deputy Fire Chief Raied S. Jadallah in response to a December 2021 story by The Palm Beach Post and USA Today that identified the individual trapped in the rubble as 14-year-old Valeria Barth.

That identification was based in part on the fact that one of the rescuers heard the voice say she had been in unit 204, which was the apartment where Barth and her parents were visiting from Colombia. But other rescuers indicated that they had heard the voice say she had been in unit 304, which was where Velasquez’s parents lived.

Additionally, rescuers said they believed the voice was of a woman and not a girl. Barth’s uncle, Sergio Barth, told Jadallah that his niece had a “very distinct high-pitched voice that could not be mistaken.” Rescuers also said that they communicated exclusively in English and the voice appeared to be that of a native speaker. While Barth spoke English, her uncle said that she was not a native speaker and spoke with a Spanish accent.

The report also addressed challenges contended with by rescuers that hindered their efforts to save Velasquez. They encountered high carbon monoxide levels and standing water, which made the conditions hazardous and made it difficult for them to effectively use their rescue tools, because power generators needed to be kept outside the parking garage where rescuers were working. Four days after Velasquez’s body was discovered, Federal Emergency Management Agency task force crews found two pneumatic shores used to prop up the ceiling of the collapse 15 feet from where Velasquez’s body had been discovered, which the department says squares with the recollections of rescuers and thus provides further evidence that Velasquez had been the voice they heard.

The Palm Beach Post/USA Today story suggested that the tools used by the Fire Rescue team might have sparked a mattress fire that ultimately killed the woman who had been trapped in the rubble, but the report indicated that Velasquez’s body showed no evidence of charring, suggestive of a fire. Another mattress did catch fire, but it was quickly extinguished, the report said.

Michael McCarter, the managing editor for standards, ethics, and inclusion at the USA Today Network said in an e-mail that the news organizations is still reviewing the findings from the report.

“The facts and the sourcing in our story are clear,” McCarter said.