An elderly couple who died in the Florida condo disaster were found by each other’s side in the mangled wreckage of the collapse — still together in bed, their family said.
Antonio Lozano, 82, and his wife, Gladys, 80, who had been married for 58 years, were pulled from the rubble by rescuers following the collapse last week of the Champlain Towers South Condo in Surfside, CBS Miami reported. “I was told they were in bed together. That’s the end of the romantic story,” their son, Sergio Lozano, told the outlet.
Sergio said his parents, who met when they were 12 years old in Cuba, often joked about who would die first, because neither wanted to live without the other. “My dad would say to my mom, ‘If you die, I don’t even know how to fry an egg, I’m gonna die.’ My mom would say, if my dad would die, ‘I don’t know how to pay the bills,’” Sergio said. “I always told my mom, ‘Don’t worry, I will do it.’ But they died together.”
He said he last saw his parents for dinner at their ninth-floor condo Wednesday evening, just hours before their building crumbled to the ground. “After dinner, I work early in the mornings and hugged my mom good night, kissed my dad, and that was it — no more,” he said.
Rescue teams including 200 specialists and trained sniffer dogs have been working around the clock in 12-hour shifts to try and locate survivors, with the support of hundreds more firefighters, police, engineers, environmental safety experts and others. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the collapse of the 40-year-old residential high-rise.
