Andrea (left), Pablo (center), and Martin Langesfeld (right) hold a photograph of their daughter and sister, Nicky Langesfeld and her husband Luis Sadovnic, at a park in Doral, Fla., where the city named a street Nicky Langesfeld Place to honor her memory, Martin says, “as a reminder that she’ll be here with us forever.” Nicole “Nicky” and Luis were two of the 98 people killed when the Champlain Towers South condominium building collapsed in Surfside on June 24, 2021.
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SURFSIDE, Fla. — Just around the corner from where a beachfront condominium collapsed five years ago, there’s a makeshift memorial: a plastic banner strung up on a wood frame, with the names of the 98 victims, ranging in age from a year-old infant to a 92-year-old grandmother.
“It’s an unfortunate reminder of how big this tragedy was,” says Martin Langesfeld, locating the name of his sister Nicky, 26, and her husband Luis Sadovnik, 28. “It’s more than just names. It’s stories. It’s families.”
Two-thirds of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building collapsed just after 1 a.m. on June 24, 2021. It started when the pool deck caved in. Seven minutes later, as many of the occupants were sleeping, the tower began to fall.
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Five escaped, and three were rescued from the rubble with severe injuries by first responders. Search teams evacuated residents in the remaining part of the building, which was demolished 10 days later for safety reasons.
Search and rescue personnel work in the rubble of the 12-story, beachfront Champlain Towers South condominium that crumbled to the ground on June 24, 2021 in Surfside.
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Hundreds were left without a home and belongings, and the state was forced to grapple with how it regulates structural safety.
Langesfeld is among those who’ve been pushing to improve what they consider a lax system of building oversight. His sister and brother-in-law were newlyweds, who had moved into the condo together just a few months earlier.
“A dream place, home, where you feel you’re safest is where they were killed,” he says.
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He’s also frustrated there is no permanent memorial honoring the victims, while a new luxury condo is going up on the land where Champlain Towers once stood.
“It’s been almost five years and there’s no development for the memorial,” he says. “And the development for the new building is very well underway.”
The North Tower of the Champlain Towers condominium complex stands on April 27, overlooking the vacant site where its sister building, Champlain Towers South, collapsed on June 24, 2021. The collapse resulted in 98 deaths and remains one of the largest structural failures in U.S. history. A new luxury condominium complex, the Delmore, is slated for construction on the empty lot.
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Technical findings released Monday by the National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded the problem started about three weeks before the collapse when two connections between garage columns and the pool deck failed, causing cracks to grow and loads to shift to connections that were not strong enough to support them.
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Investigators found “severe and widespread deviations in the building’s original structural design from the codes and standards of the day,” and that the building’s construction in 1981 deviated from the design drawings. Investigators will issue a final report later that includes recommendations for changes to standards, codes and practices to improve building safety.
To date, no one has been held criminally responsible.
But in a complex civil lawsuit, more than 30 defendants contributed to a $1.2 billion class action settlement reached just a year after the collapse to address wrongful death, personal injury and property loss claims.
“I think what was apparent to all parties, legal parties, is that it was an enormous loss,” says Coral Gables attorney Rachel Wagner Furst, co-lead counsel representing the Surfside victims.
None of the settling parties admitted liability or wrongdoing, but Wagner Furst says the litigation pointed to many factors that contributed to the scope of the disaster beyond the condo board, which was singled out in the initial lawsuit for not heeding warning signs and deferring repairs on the 40-year-old building.
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She notes, “Companies and individuals who had serviced the Champlain Towers South condominium building in the years before the collapse that had arguably or allegedly failed in some way to provide proper maintenance advice or counsel, including the security company that had staffed the front desk of the building and was on duty at the time that the alarm ought to have sounded.”
Attorney Rachel Wagner Furst served as co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit for the victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, which resulted in a $1.2 billion settlement.
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The Surfside collapse was a wake-up call for condo associations and regulators around the country.
In the immediate aftermath in South Florida, some two dozen properties were evacuated for safety concerns. Most eventually were able to return after repairs.
The state responded by passing more stringent regulations, including new mandates for structural inspections and requiring condo associations to maintain a minimum level of reserve funding for structural upkeep.
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“The Florida legislature pushed the burden to create safe housing stock in Florida onto the people who are least able to bear it, which is the Florida consumer,” says Ft. Lauderdale attorney Donna DiMaggio Berger who specializes in condominium law, and founded a group that lobbies on behalf of the more than 50,000 community associations in Florida.
She says developers also should share in the burden.
“If we wind up with the safest housing stock in the country. Bravo, well done,” she says. But “safe buildings start with the people who build them and repair them.”
Construction cranes line the skyline along the beach in Surfside, Fla., on April 27.
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No matter how well-intentioned, the building reforms could have unintended consequences, says Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
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She says some buildings have been taken over by people who want to turn them into more expensive, luxurious developments.
“There’s tremendous pressure that people can’t afford these things and so they’re forced to sell,” she says. “We call it ‘condo vultures,’ and it is at our peril.”
Levine Cava says she understands that people want to live “the good life” in South Florida, but there must be balance.
“We know we live in paradise,” she says. “We also know that we need to have people of all means in our community.”
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava says her community was severely changed by this tragedy, “the pain is still very real. Many people have moved on with their lives and others are still suffering greatly.”
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That’s long been the conundrum in Florida, a trend that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic when people flocked to the Sunshine State.
And it’s evident in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, which is becoming an ultra-wealthy enclave with a wall of condos lining the Atlantic, and more under construction. The area is adjacent to swanky shopping malls and private islands where tech titans have waterfront estates.
The Champlain Towers South property itself is soon to be home to the community’s latest luxury development, The Delmore. Billed as “expansive mansions in the sky,” the sales price of the units starts at $15 million; penthouses go for more than $150 million.
“Each penthouse has its own private pool, and that’s a glass-fronted pool that gets the view to the ocean,” says developer Jeffery Rossely, pointing to the layout on a scale model in a posh sales gallery.
Jeffery Rossely, a developer at the Dubai-based firm Damac Properties, points to a model of a luxury property called The Delmore.
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Rossely is with Damac Properties, a Dubai-based firm. This is the company’s first residential project in the U.S. Damac was the only bidder with a $120 million cash offer for the property.
“It was obviously at the time a tragic opportunity, but the courts had already ordered sale of the property,” Rossely says. “The money was required to compensate the victims.”
But the project has not received a warm welcome in Surfside. At town meetings he says his company has been accused of having blood on its hands.
A sign welcoming visitors to Surfside, Fla., stands directly across the street from the former site of the Champlain Towers South condominium. Today, a new luxury residential development called The Delmore is under construction on the empty lot where the tower once stood.
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“I didn’t understand why there would be angst for someone coming in and paying that money upfront,” says Rossely.
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But in retrospect, he concedes, the project needed a different approach.
“We should have spent a bit more time on due diligence, on community reaction, rather than on the physical property itself,” Rossely says. “We went through what I would call the traditional due diligence. Maybe we should have gone through emotional due diligence, as well.”
The question now is whether people will want to live in the new building. There are no buyers yet in the pre-sale phase.
Meanwhile, the town of Surfside will light a torch at 1:15 a.m. on Wednesday, just outside the development’s fence, to remember the Champlain Towers South victims five years after the collapse.
Mexico has begun filing criminal complaints with state prosecutors in the United States over the deaths of its citizens in U.S. immigration custody and during enforcement operations, the foreign mini
Aida Pelaez Fernandez and Natalia Siniawski | Reuters
Maine ICE shooting caught on security camera
Surveillance footage from two local businesses shows a white car driving in circles at a street intersection.
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MEXICO CITY, July 13 (Reuters) – Mexico has begun filing criminal complaints with state prosecutors in the United States over the deaths of its citizens in U.S. immigration custody and during enforcement operations, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
More: Maine voices outrage after deadly immigration enforcement shooting
Mexico’s government has also sent cease-and-desist letters to U.S. detention centers where Mexican nationals have died, the ministry added in a statement.
More: ICE fatally shoots Mexican immigrant in Houston
The filings follow the deaths of at least 14 Mexican nationals in ICE custody and several others during arrest operations, including the recent fatal shooting of a Mexican citizen by an ICE agent in Houston.
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President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Mexico’s intention to escalate its response to the deaths last Friday, as she claimed that the government “cannot turn a blind eye to the Mexicans who have died.”
In addition to the measures in the U.S., Mexico’s foreign minister also contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights regarding the deaths of Mexican nationals in ICE custody.
Mexico expects the U.N. office to gather information from U.S. authorities, analyze the events and “refer the case to the relevant special procedures of the Human Rights Council,” the statement added.
This much is undisputed: On Nov. 2, 2023, a guard and a prisoner at a federal penitentiary in California got into it over a straw sunhat that the officer had confiscated. The man — identified in court records by his initials, J.M. — walked out of the office, as Officer Sandra Munagay followed him. When he stopped and turned around, Munagay “cocked back … and punched me in my face,” he said in an interview. That is on camera. Munagay admitted to the assault and pleaded guilty this January to falsifying records about it.
But the more severe harm came after, J.M. said, in a hallway without security cameras. As Munagay kicked and hit him, she shouted to other officers that J.M.had attacked her. According to a lawsuit, at least three other guards then rushed in, forced him into a blind spot, and pinned him face-first to a wall. With J.M.’s hands cuffed, he says an officer then sexually assaulted him with an unknown object.
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That night, J.M. was transferred to another prison, where a nurse noted bleeding and tenderness in his rectum, medical records show. That gave J.M. more proof than most people behind bars in his situation.
But guards still had near-total control over whether he could file a complaint, or someday sue over what happened to him. J.M. knew they could destroy his paperwork, claim it got lost, or simply deny him the forms he needed. And like he had experienced in other federal prisons, he says, they might punish him for even trying to speak out.
It’s the same dilemma presented to anyone who faces violence in federal prison: Try to file an administrative grievance and risk opening yourself up to retaliation — or stay quiet, endure the abuse, and forgo your chance to someday bring your case to court.
Under federal law, people in prison must go through the facility’s own grievance process before they can attempt to sue. That gives prison staff a “chokehold over access to the courts,” said Colin Prince, a civil rights attorney and former federal defender who is representing J.M. in his lawsuit.
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“The guards functionally have power over whether a prisoner can sue them for their own misconduct,” he said. “The entire system is layer upon layer of bureaucratic insulation against accountability. It simply prevents prisoners from getting access to the courts.”
An attorney for Munagay said he and his client declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons, Randilee Giamusso, said she could not discuss individual cases or ongoing litigation.
An investigation by The Marshall Project and NPR found that less than 2% of grievances filed in federal prison in 2023 were granted. A majority were rejected for procedural errors or “administratively closed” for other reasons. The findings were based on a federal database, published by the Data Liberation Project, containing nearly 1 million federal prison grievance cases dating back to 2000.
But that data only includes instances where incarcerated people were able to file a complaint at all. An unknown number of cases, especially those involving physical and sexual violence, go unreported, as the same officers accused of abuse can silence those trying to seek help, according to court records, lawsuits, and interviews with attorneys, incarcerated people, advocates and former bureau officials. A recent report by the Government Accountability Office found that fear of retaliation was a major impediment to reducing and reporting sexual abuse in federal prisons.
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Prison officials said bureau policy prohibits retaliation of any kind, and that they review and investigate allegations of abuse. In an email, Giamusso wrote that the remedy system is “a safeguard intended to foster resolution within the system, not a barrier to court access.” She noted that remedies related to sexual abuse can be submitted in other ways, such as “third-party reporting and [Prison Rape Elimination Act]-specific channels.”
But many prisoners disagree. “The grievance system is a joke,” said Jimmy Hodge, who was released from federal prison in early 2025. Hodge says he was abused in multiple federal penitentiaries, but was frequently blocked from filing complaints about it. “If you’re grieving over abuse, they’re going to harass you, they’re going to assault you, but you’re never going to get relief.”
Since the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act 30 years ago, which required incarcerated people to file grievances before attempting to sue, the rate of civil rights cases filed from prison has dropped significantly.
Lawmakers at the time were concerned about “frivolous” lawsuits from prisons overwhelming federal courts. Politicians pointed to one case where a person had allegedly sued over whether he received chunky or creamy peanut butter. (The case was actually about not getting a $2.50 refund for peanut butter returned to the commissary, which is the equivalent of hours of prison labor.)
“People talk a lot about prisoners filing frivolous lawsuits,” said professor Margo Schlanger of the University of Michigan Law School, who has studied prison litigation across the U.S. “But a huge number of prisoner cases are about really, really serious matters. They’re about abysmal medical care and awful conditions and failures to protect them from harm by staff or by other prisoners. They’re about sexual violations.”
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Attempts to significantly reform the law have gone nowhere, Schlanger said. “Having a system that stands in the way and says, ‘You know what, because you filed that grievance after three days instead of after two, you are out of luck and out of court’ — that is a shocking betrayal of justice.”
People who are blocked from filing grievances can sometimes convince a court that the remedy system was unavailable and their lawsuit should proceed. But that is a high bar that may require documentation and the help of an attorney, which many people filing from prison don’t have.
As is, the law fails to account for all the ways prison staff can thwart someone’s attempts to follow the remedy process, attorneys say.
To submit a complaint, someone must obtain a form from their counselor or another prison employee and then return the completed form to staff. According to bureau rules, an incarcerated person must file on their own behalf, unless it is regarding sexual abuse — whether they are in the infirmary or solitary confinement or have a disability. They can receive assistance with their filing from “trained inmate aides,” someone on the outside or a staff member, Giamusso wrote.
For people in isolation, filing a complaint is even harder. “You can’t just walk over to a box on the wall that says grievances and put it in the slot,” said attorney John Boston, co-author of the “Prisoners’ Self-Help Litigation Manual.” “You’ve got to hand it to the correctional officer. And that right there is a prescription for mischief.”
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Multiple people in federal prison said officers refused to provide the forms they needed. “I have had difficulty in obtaining the initial grievance form because the unit counselor who issues the forms was friends with the officer whom the complaint was about,” wrote Erick Hobbs, now incarcerated in federal prison in North Carolina. According to Giamusso, if someone can’t get a form, they can ask for help from any staffer, “proceed to the next step in the remedy process, or report concerns through alternative channels.”
Even if you can get a form, there’s no guarantee the paperwork will be filed. “I have had officers doing a ‘random shakedown’ of a cell, and remedy papers go missing,” wrote William Batton, from a federal prison in Massachusetts. Many said prisoners were often transferred to a new facility and lost their paperwork in the process. That halts a case, as any appeal requires copies of every previous response and filing.
People in federal prison have just 20 days after an incident to file a complaint. Those regarding sexual abuse are supposed to be exempt from deadlines, under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. There is no such exemption for physical violence.
“People who are the most hurt are often the least equipped to describe it and file a grievance promptly,” Schlanger said. “Requiring them to very speedily figure out exactly what they’re complaining about can be a very, very high hurdle.”
By the time J.M. was assaulted in California, he had served time in some of the country’s most notorious federal prisons. In 2020, he was held at Big Sandy penitentiary in Kentucky, where officers had an unofficial policy: If someone requested protective custody because they feared other prisoners, guards would beat the person asking for help. Then the guards worked together to cover up the attacks, according to court records. Six staff members at Big Sandy were convicted for their role in the abuse.
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J.M. tried to report the abuse he received at Big Sandy penitentiary in 2020 to the Eastern District Court of Kentucky. The highlighting and redactions were done by The Marshall Project.
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When J.M. tried to report the abuse he said he suffered at the hands of Big Sandy staff, it only brought more mistreatment. “I have an 8th-grade education, I don’t understand law,” he wrote to a federal court in 2020. “I have been targeted, retaliated and abused for trying to exhaust my remedies. Big Sandy [staff] told me if I keep filing these remedies that I won’t ever leave.” In his letter, J.M. described being chained to a chair for 12 to 18 hours at a time with no “food water or bathroom.”
“Nobody should get chained to no bed for … hours for filing a piece of paper, no matter what,” J.M. said in a recent interview.
His plea to the court, like several others filed from Big Sandy at that time, went nowhere.
In one case reviewed by The Marshall Project, an incarcerated man reported being pepper-sprayed, choked, beaten with a baton and repeatedly called racial slurs by Kentucky officers who were later convicted. He tried multiple times to file grievances about the attacks but received no response before he was transferred to another prison, according to a legal complaint. When he sued in court, his case was thrown out: He hadn’t completed the final two levels of the bureau’s remedy process.
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By 2021, J.M. was transferred from Big Sandy to Thomson penitentiary in Illinois, then one of the most violent federal prisons in the country. Bureau officials closed the high-security Special Management Unit there in 2023, after an investigation by The Marshall Project and NPR exposed a culture of abuse and multiple homicides.
In his legal complaint, J.M. said officers at Thomson also refused to provide him with grievance forms. In a survey of over 120 people who had been held at Thomson, conducted by legal advocacy group The Washington Lawyers’ Committee, many reported the same interference. “I’m gonna break your fucking hands since you like to write us up,” one man said he was told, after an officer confiscated his stamps and legal documents.
There are supposed to be other avenues for incarcerated people to report their abuse. But in a setting where no communication is truly anonymous, and the fear of retaliation is prevalent, even reaching out to the Inspector General felt risky, J.M. said. And it was hard to trust another government agency. “It’s like being in a house, and your mother or father is abusing you,” he explained. “And then you go and try and tell your mother or father, ‘Y’all abusing me.’ It didn’t make sense.”
In the U.S. Government Accountability Office report, published in May, investigators found that most surveyed prisoners said they could experience retaliation from staff if they reported sexual abuse. Less than half said they would feel comfortable reporting to the warden or a corrections officer. And many of the surveyed people didn’t know they had other options to report a sexual assault, like calling a rape crisis center or asking a family member to report on their behalf. The bureau agreed with the recommendations laid out in the report.
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Fear of being targeted can hide systemic problems. At FCI Dublin in California, which closed in 2024 over widespread sexual abuse, officers frequently punished people for trying to file complaints, said Aron Laureano, who spent two years at the facility.
“They made it literally impossible for anybody to say anything,” she said. The first time Laureano filed a grievance, an officer came to her cell and quoted from her written complaint in front of everyone. “And that’s why they got away with it for so long.”
According to a federal lawsuit, officers retaliated against Laureano by placing her in solitary confinement, taking away her visits and phone calls, and confiscating her property. In one bizarre form of punishment, Laureano said, an officer made her walk around the prison yard, gather the eggs and baby hatchlings of geese who were roosting on the grounds, and stuff them in a trash bag.
Laureano came home from prison in 2024. “You went from one monster to another,” she said of navigating her time at Dublin. “You didn’t have anywhere to go. And I think that’s the worst feeling in the world. I told myself I would never put myself in a predicament like that again, ever.”
After the 2023 assault at Atwater penitentiary in California, J.M. was transferred to a different federal facility and locked in solitary confinement for making threats, insolence, and refusing to obey an order. In her official retelling of the incident, Officer Munagay had claimed that J.M. “walked toward me in an aggressive way” and that she “feared for [her] life.”
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What happened with Munagay and the other officers followed J.M. to the new facility. “Everybody knew about the situation, it was funny to them,” he said of the guards there. “I had officers come and tell me, ‘Hey, drop the case, she’s got three kids.’” Staff also began threatening him, according to J.M.’s complaint. They told other prisoners he was a snitch, he said, and locked him in four-point restraints for hours, where each limb was chained to a concrete slab.
It wasn’t just the guards he was worried about. J.M. had seen employees turn prisoners against each other, he said, as payback for writing someone up. “If I file a remedy … my unit team is going to come … take everybody’s stuff, trash everybody’s cells, and say, ‘We’re doing this because [J.M.] complained,’” he said. “Now the other inmates are mad, ‘Oh, it’s your fault.’ Your life is in danger.”
Federal prison policy required J.M. to file his complaint at the institution level first, unless it was regarding a “sensitive” issue. Then he could mail a claim directly to the regional director. J.M. didn’t have enough postage, so he fashioned a fishing line out of plastic wrappers, and used it to trade food for stamps with other men on the tier.
His grievance was rejected. The bureau did not consider his issue “sensitive,” according to a federal database, and required him to file again at the prison level. When J.M. went to file an appeal, prison staff seized and destroyed his paperwork, his lawsuit says.
“He had been assaulted, isolated, trapped, and could not tell anyone who would listen,” his complaint states. “By mid-January 2024 … JM was expressing ‘suicidality’ to the mental-health department because he could not ‘participate’ in the ‘Administrative Remedy Process.’”
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Nearly six months after his attack, prison staff dropped the disciplinary charges against J.M., as video footage showed Munagay had punched him. Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Munagay six months later. In June, she was sentenced to four months in prison. J.M.’s lawsuit is ongoing.
No charges have been filed regarding the sexual assault J.M. says he experienced. In 2024, there were 32 allegations of sexual abuse by staff reported at Atwater penitentiary.
J.M. has since been moved to another federal penitentiary out of state. His struggles with the grievance system continue. He’s trying to appeal a grievance he filed about not receiving his allotment of postage stamps, but he doesn’t have enough stamps to mail the paperwork.
“I’m resilient. I’m not going to give up just because other people failed,” he said about his commitment to keep trying to use the system. “I’m going to keep filing no matter how small or big the situation is, and hopefully something will change. These are the rules I gotta follow. This is the only way I got to fight.”
A person was killed Monday in an ICE-involved shooting in Biddeford, Maine, according to the state’s speaker of the house — just days after a federal agent fatally shot a Mexican immigrant during a traffic stop in Houston, sparking mass protests and demands for transparency and accountability.
“A person was killed. ICE was involved. State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well,” Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau said in a statement on Facebook. “These are the details that I have at this time. I will provide further updates, as they are relayed to me.”
CNN has reached out to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Biddeford police told CNN there was a “police incident” in the area, about 18 miles south of Portland, and said there is no threat to the public at this time, but declined to provide additional details.
Maine Democratic US Rep. Chellie Pingree said she was “disturbed and angry” upon hearing the news of the shooting. She called for an investigation into the incident, adding a question directed at ICE officers: “Why are you in Maine?”
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The incident comes less than a week after a man on his way to work in Houston was shot and killed by an ICE agent. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed during a traffic stop in what ICE initially described as a targeted enforcement operation, though a source later said Salgado Araujo was not the target of the operation.
The shooting has reignited calls for accountability among ICE agents, which reached a fever pitch earlier this year after 37-year-old mother Renee Good and 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti were killed by federal immigration agents during the Trump administration’s operation in Minneapolis.
The administration dubbed a similar surge in immigration enforcement across Maine in January “Operation Catch of the Day.” The ACLU and other advocates filed a lawsuit against federal immigration agents for “abducting a lawful immigrant” during the surge.
Some community groups and advocates that rallied against the surge earlier this year have already started to organize in response to Monday’s shooting. The group “Maine Resists” has planned an emergency community rally in the city at noon. The racial justice and immigrant rights group Project Relief said it is in touch with the victim’s family.
