SURFSIDE, Fla. — Two weeks after the building collapse at Surfside, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said 60 bodies have been recovered from the rubble, as authorities pledged on their first official day of search and recovery to find every single victim.
“The work continues with all speed and all urgency,” said Levine Cava during a press briefing on Thursday morning.
First responders paused their work briefly at 1:20 a.m. to honor the victims of the collapse and mark two full weeks since the partial collapse. As of Thursday morning, 80 people remained missing, Levine Cava said.
Levine Cava said responders will be looking for personal items during the recovery process, including legal documents, photo albums, wallets, jewelry, school graduation documents, religious items, phones and more.
Particular care is being taken to ensure proper Jewish burial rituals are observed and rabbis are present on site to perform ritual prayer over recovered Jewish bodies, Levine Cava said.
The morning after officials announced the mission at the site of the partial building collapse in Surfside had shifted from search and rescue to recovery, candles lined the ground before the makeshift memorial wall, some of them still burning from the night before.
A new addition were the 34 white poles on the sidewalk before the wall, each with a blue heart and bearing the name of a confirmed victim of the collapse. Lutheran Church Charities volunteers arrived at the wall with the markers Wednesday afternoon, and again Thursday morning, attaching black Sharpies to each one so community members can pass along messages to the victims’ families.
“It can be friends of the family, or it can be just someone in the community who has been highly affected by the condo collapse,” said Bonnie Fear, the national Lutheran group’s K-9 crisis response coordinator invited to Surfside by the Holy Cross Lutheran Church in North Miami. “They can write an expression perhaps to release the pain, anxiety, suffering they’re feeling, even if they don’t know the person.”
The markers bore inscriptions in English, Spanish, Hebrew and Portuguese. Some passerby had drawn small broken hearts and signed their names. Others left unsigned messages like, “I love you” and “May God be with you during these sad days,” an unsigned inscription on the marker for Tzvi Ainsworth, one of the identified victims.
The Lutheran group has as many as 160 markers ready to be used, she said, and plans to continue bringing them to the wall as the death toll climbs.
Before the Surfside collapse, the group has performed similar services primarily at sites of mass shootings: In Orlando after the Pulse nightclub shooting, in Parkland after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Las Vegas after the concert shooting, and most recently in Boulder, Colorado, for the victims of a mass shooting at a grocery store.
Along with the markers, the group brought nine golden retrievers trained as “comfort dogs,” each dressed in vests that read “Please Pet Me.”
“They are our bridge to connect to people who are hurting or grieving,” Fear said. “They pet them, they hug them, they cry with them, they laugh with them. By the time we’re done, a lot of times, they say, this is the best part of my day.”
Lourdes Losada, the college roommate of Maria Teresa Rovirosa, stood at the memorial wall looking up at the photo of her friend of 40 years high up on the chain-link fence. Losada paused in speaking about her friend, who along with her husband is still missing in the collapse, to pet one of the golden retrievers.
“She had a heart of... she was just a great person. I can’t come to the words right now because I’m still in shock,” Losada said of her friend. “She would take what she had and give it to everybody.”
Losada said that Wednesday night’s news of an official shift from search-and-rescue to recovery efforts only enforced what she already knew.
“We expected that they weren’t going to make it after the third or fourth day,” she said. “She was a fighter, and so was her husband, but I knew they weren’t going to make it.”
At the foot of the fence, adorned with stuffed animals, photographs, a Puerto Rican flag, a cardboard sign reading “Strength, Faith, Hope, Love,” and slowly wilting flowers, several others stood, signing their names to the markers, laying down flowers, or just gazing at the wall.
At Losada’s feet lay a new trove of objects, some of which a police officer nearby said had been recovered from the site of the collapse and brought to the wall by rescue workers. A pack of cigarettes, a psalm book, a stapled paper handout on “critical incident stress management,” black slippers, plastic wrap from an emptied flower bouquet, and a children’s toy water gun all lay inches apart before the wall.
Nearby, a T-shift on the ground read “To the stolen lives of Miami.” A yellow sign on the fence said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
