The victims' ages at the time of the collapse will play a huge role in deciding how much money their families will get.
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Family members hold vigil last month for the deceased victims and people who are missing from the condo collapse in Surfside |
"Are the family
members young children who are parentless , or are they
adults who essentially are fully self-sufficient?
Ultimately, any settlement amount or monetary award to a
compensation fund is going to be driven by doing one's best
guess at what a jury would be likely to award," Sohn said.
Kenneth Feinberg has made his best guess many times when he
was the special master of the September 11th Victim
Compensation Fund — for victims of the World Trade Center
attack on Sept. 11, 2001.
He hosted nearly 1,000 hearings with family members to come
up with an amount for them.
"And it was absolutely harrowing and it was very
debilitating," Feinberg told WLRN. "I never got over it."
He says making distinctions based on earning potential —
like, was someone a nanny or a banker?
"You promote the very divisiveness you're trying to avoid,"
Feinberg said about the process. "Calculating different
values for each life is the majority view in every court in
Florida, in every court in the nation — all lives are not
equal."
When he did this work after the June 12, 2016 , Pulse
nightclub shooting in Orlando, he split the money equally
among the families of the 49 victims because those dollars
came from donations.
"All lives were valued the same because that money was a
gift from the American people," he said.
In the case of Surfside, the money comes from a settlement
that was reached to avoid a jury trial. Families will fill
out forms, and if they want to, they may speak about their
loved ones in court. Then the court will guess what a jury
would have awarded each family, taking into consideration
the differences in their situations.
After court recently, Pablo Langesfeld said it doesn’t
matter how much money his family gets for the loss of his
daughter, Nicole, because of the magnitude of their loss.
"There isn't a monetary value that would replace a life," he
said in Spanish. "Regardless of how much money they give us,
we will always have a big wound."
Langesfeld said the only thing he wants is to know why the
building collapsed. A federal investigation by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology continues into what
caused this disaster.
Pablo Rodriguez dreads the process of filling out forms
about his mom, Elena Blasser, and grandmother, Elena Chavez,
who both died in the collapse.
"Just the thought that there’s gonna be a group of people
sitting there, trying to put a dollar value on my mom, on my
grandmother — to me is not only absurd but a little bit
insulting," he said.
He says siblings will then need to divide the money amongst
themselves after the death of a mother, for instance , "to
try to compensate anything for the fact that you can no
longer see them ever again. It’s still a very long, drawn -
out and heartbreaking process to go forward."
Rodriguez says he feels conflicted about the settlement
because it comes with money but no accountability — no one
is admitting fault.
Families who don't opt - out of this settlement are slated
to receive their payments in September.