Relatives of Florida condo collapse victims disagree over where memorial should be built
CBC
The fight over whether the site of June's deadly Florida condominium collapse should be sold for development or turned into a memorial boiled over at a court hearing Thursday, with some victims' relatives begging for time to find a buyer who won't put a new luxury high-rise there.
Several victims' relatives said the Surfside, Fla., site where the 12-storey Champlain Towers South once stood is hallowed ground. They pleaded with the judge overseeing the sale of the land to let them find a private party or government that would buy the two-acre beachfront lot at its approximate value of $150 million US and donate it for a memorial to the 98 who died.
Four Canadians were among the dead.
The mother and wife of two of them, Elena Pazos, was among the survivors who said during the hearing that they support the property's sale and would like to see a memorial built elsewhere.
Pazos said she never wants to go to the site because that will only reopen her wounds. She lost her 55-year-old husband, Miguel Pazos, her 23-year-old daughter, Michelle Pazos, and her daughter's best friend, Anastasia Gromova, 24, in the collapse.
"Every time we would come there, we would remember how they died," Pazos said. Instead, she wants the memorial nearby, but private.
"I want to concentrate on how they lived, how they were, where they were born, where they grew up, where they fell in love, where they made friends."