Therapeutic Tears and a Compassionate Judge: $1.1B Allocated to Surfside Victims’ Families

Seventy-nine funerals in five weeks. Not at a cemetery but inside Judge Michael Hanzman’s courtroom, during unprecedented hearings held throughout an excruciating summer of sadness as he appraised the worth of the victims killed in the Surfside condominium collapse.

Family members gave presentations -- eulogies, really -- on lives well lived or cruelly cut short when Champlain Towers South, a 12-story, 40-year-old oceanfront building, suddenly fell at 1:22 a.m. on June 24, 2021.

They showed videos of weddings, birthdays, graduations and bar mitzvahs. Everyone in the room wept.

Hanzman descended from the bench to embrace sobbing relatives in the folds of his black robe. Then, working into the night, he meted out $1.1 billion in settlement funds among the loved ones of the dead.

But how to quantify a human being, whether it is a 1-year-old child or a 92-year-old grandmother, a brilliant university student researching the prototype of a prosthetic hand, a middle-aged doctor to veterans, a promising 26-year-old lawyer and her newlywed husband, a devoted father and Little League coach, a young nanny from a tiny village in Paraguay on her first trip away from home, a retired teacher and a soon-to-be-retired flight attendant?