Florida condo collapse death toll rises, search comes to end
Days after search and rescue crews were recognized at a closing ceremony at the Surfside condo collapse site, the final victim missing was identified.
USA TODAY, Storyful
As Magaly Ramsey put on her makeup for a business conference in Orlando on the morning of June 24, she turned on the television in her hotel room and peeked at the news.
The story that drew the Jupiter woman’s attention from the mirror was about the overnight collapse of a high-rise condo building in Surfside, a small seaside town near Miami Beach.
“What did they say?” asked her husband, Bill, who had accompanied Magaly to the conference.
“Something about a building collapse,” she answered.
“Call your mom,” he replied. “See if she knows anything.”
CLICK HERE for The Palm Beach Post’s extensive coverage of the Surfside condo collapse
The couple figured her 80-year-old mother, Magaly Delgado, lived somewhere near the fallen building. As calls to Delgado went unanswered, Magaly Ramsey remained calm. It was not even 9 a.m., and her mother often went to bed late.
But with her eyes glued to the TV screen, she waited for more details. Soon after, she learned the tragedy had hit home: The fallen building was Champlain Towers South.
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“Oh, my gosh,” she gasped. “That’s my mom’s building.”
The Ramseys rushed to pack up their things and took a four-and-a-half-hour trek to Surfside. On the drive down, she made a desperate call to a family reunification hotline.
“Where’s my mom?” she pleaded. “Did she get out? What happened?”
After the couple reached Surfside, they walked to the spot where the building once stood. Magaly Ramsey took in the sight of the giant pile of rubble and swore she heard the sound of her mother’s voice say, “Maggie.”
But it wasn’t her 80-year-old mother.
Why are more bodies being recovered in the Surfside condo collapse now?
Why are rescuers suddenly recovering more victims in Surfside condo collapse? Wendy Rhodes explains.
Wendy Rhodes, Palm Beach Post
Surfside victim’s daughter: ‘At least let her earthly body be found’
As she stared at what was left of the 13-story condo tower that housed her mother for a decade, her heart sank.
“Can a human body be squished to the point where it doesn’t exist anymore?” Ramsey wondered.
The answer, she learned from a rescue official at the collapse site, was yes.
“My prayer became, ‘At least let her earthly body be found, so I can lay her to rest in peace,’” Ramsey said. “That was crushing to me, but that became my prayer, because from what I could see, nobody would be able to survive that.”
Her prayer was answered a week after the building collapsed, on June 30, when her mother’s body was recovered from the rubble. She found out the next day when she got a call from an unknown number.
She gave the phone to her husband and walked past the Sea View Hotel in Bal Harbour, where others had gone to wait for news of their missing loved ones. The voice on the phone asked the couple to meet a Miami-Dade Police officer one block from the hotel. The officer, who Ramsey said was kind and thoughtful, broke the news to them.
“It was like not being able to breathe and finally being able to breathe a little,” Ramsey said. “You might be sobbing while you’re breathing, but at least you’re breathing.”
More: Remembering those who died in the Champlain Towers condo collapse in Surfside
Mother’s Day in Jupiter was the final day together for the two
The last time Ramsey saw her mother was at her home in Jupiter on Mother’s Day, May 9. Her mother had arrived from Surfside with croquetas — a kind of fried dumpling — and the two went to brunch at Andalucía Tapas Bar & Restaurant, an authentic Spanish restaurant in Tequesta. Ramsey knew her mother would love the paella and wine.
“Oh, this is good,” her mother had told her.
Delgado had grown up in Melena del Sur, a small town south of Havana, with her parents and her sister, who was 10 years older. She left the island in 1961, when she was 21, with her sister and her baby nephew, to escape Fidel Castro’s government. Her parents initially stayed behind hoping things got better in the country, but they didn’t.
In the decade before she moved to Surfside, she lived with her husband, Adalberto Alfonso, in Jupiter. They were only a few miles from their daughter and grandsons, Matthew and Christopher.
She had wanted to show her grandsons the world and took the boys, who are five years apart, on solo trips with her to New York when each reached the age of 8. She even signed up Matthew, the younger, for ice-skating lessons so he could glide on the ice at Rockefeller Center.
“She wanted to enjoy the world through their eyes,” Ramsey said. “She would take them to the finest places to dine in New York. My kids knew how to use which fork when by the time they were 3 and 5 years old. You would ask my kids, ‘Do you want a hamburger?’ ‘No, I want a lobster.’”
She had also taught them the proper way to eat a Godiva chocolate.
“She would hide her Godivas and then take them out and say, ‘You want a Godiva?'” Ramsey said. “My kids would say, ‘Yeah,’ and she would say, ‘Well, you have to learn how to eat a Godiva. You have to savor it.’”
Surfside victim had told daughter not to ‘dress her in black’ at funeral
After 40 years, Delgado and her husband divorced and she moved to Surfside. Her ex-husband died from Covid-19 in August.
In Surfsid, she felt at peace at Champlain Towers South, where she had a stellar view of the beach from her condo.
She had a good friend who lived three floors down, a 92-year-old woman named Hilda Noriega, who was the mother of North Bay Village Police Chief Carlos Noriega. The neighbors, who shared the same circle of women friends from church, looked out for each other at the condo. Noriega often helped Delgado change her hair from gray to blond.
“She is a lovely lady with a lovely family,” Delgado had told Ramsey. “She is a very strong woman. Younger than her years.”
Noriega also died in the collapse.
Just over a week after Delgado’s body was found, on July 8, three priests presided over her funeral Mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Miami Beach. In her sealed casket, Delgado was dressed in a vibrant green high-collar dress.
“When I die, don’t wear that black thing,” Delgado had told Ramsey. “People mourn in that black thing. Please, that’s so old-fashioned. Don’t ever do that.”
A good crowd of friends and loved ones filed into the church pews with their heads hung low. After prayers were recited and hymns were sung, Delgado was buried beneath her parents at the Woodlawn Park Cemetery in Miami. Her only child gasped a sigh of relief.
“It was a weight lifted off my shoulders,” Ramsey said. “The burden of what happened will never leave me. But if I would have never found her, that would have crushed me.”
vvillanueva@pbpost.com
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