BREAKING Police investigating shooting outside of Drake's Bridle Path mansion: source
Toronto police are investigating a shooting that took place outside of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion early Tuesday morning, a source tells CP24.
Firefighters on Friday declared the end of their search for bodies at the site of a collapsed Florida condo building, concluding a month of painstaking work removing layers of dangerous debris that were once piled several stories high.
The June 24 collapse at the oceanside Champlain Towers South killed 97 people, with at least one more missing person yet to be identified. The site has been mostly swept flat and the rubble moved to a Miami warehouse. Although forensic scientists are still at work, including examining the debris at the warehouse, there are no more bodies to be found where the building once stood.
Except during the early hours after the collapse, survivors never emerged. Search teams spent weeks battling the hazards of the rubble, including an unstable portion of the building that teetered above, a recurring fire and Florida's stifling summer heat and thunderstorms. They went through more than 14,000 tons (13,000 metric tonnes) of broken concrete and rebar, often working boulder by boulder, rock by rock, before finally declaring the mission complete.
Miami-Dade Fire Rescue's urban search-and-rescue team pulled away from the site Friday in a convoy of firetrucks and other vehicles, slowly driving to their headquarters for a news conference to announce that the search was officially over.
At a ceremony, Fire Chief Alan Cominsky saluted the firefighters who worked 12-hour shifts while camping out at the site.
"It's obviously devastating. It's obviously a difficult situation across the board," Cominsky said. "I couldn't be prouder of the men and women that represent Miami-Dade Fire Rescue."
Officials have declined to clarify whether they have one additional set of human remains in hand that pathologists are struggling to identify or whether a search for that final set of remains continues.
If found, Estelle Hedaya would bring the death toll to 98.
Hedaya was an outgoing 54-year-old who loved to travel and was fond of striking up conversations with strangers. Her younger brother Ikey has given DNA samples and visited the site twice to see the search efforts for himself.
"As we enter month two alone, without any other families, we feel helpless," he told The Associated Press on Friday. He said he gets frequent updates from the medical examiner's office.
Leah Sutton, who knew Hedaya since birth and considered herself a second mother to her, is worried that she will be forgotten.
"They seem to be packing up and congratulating everyone on a job well done. And yes, they deserve all the accolades, but after they find Estelle."
The dead included members of the area's large Orthodox Jewish community, the sister of Paraguay's first lady, her family and their nanny, as well as a local salesman, his wife and their two young daughters.
The collapse fueled a race to inspect other aging residential towers in Florida and beyond, and it raised broader questions about the nation's regulations governing condominium associations and building safety.
Shortly after the disaster, it became clear that warnings about Champlain Towers South, which opened in 1981, had gone unheeded. A 2018 engineering report detailed cracked and degraded concrete support beams in the underground parking garage and other problems that would cost nearly $10 million to fix.
The repairs did not happen, and the estimate grew to $15 million this year as the owners of the building's 136 units and its governing condo board squabbled over the cost, especially after a Surfside town inspector told them the building was safe.
A complete collapse was all but impossible to imagine. As many officials said in the catastrophe's first days, buildings of that size do not just collapse in the U.S. outside of a terrorist attack. Even tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes rarely bring them down.
The ultimate fate of the property where the building once stood has yet to be determined. A judge presiding over several lawsuits filed in the collapse aftermath wants the property sold at market rates, which would bring in an estimated $100 million or more. Some condo owners want to rebuild, and others say a memorial should be erected to remember the dead.
"All options are on the table," Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Hanzman said at a hearing this week.
The disaster was one of the nation's deadliest engineering failures. A set of overhead walkways collapsed at a Kansas City hotel in 1981, killing 114 people attending a dance. But that wasn't the structure itself. A Washington, D.C., movie theater collapsed in 1922, killing 98. But that came after a blizzard dumped feet of snow on the flat roof.
In the weeks after the collapse, a 28-story courthouse in downtown Miami, built in 1928, and two apartment buildings were closed after inspectors uncovered structural problems. They will remain shut until repairs are made.
The first calls to 911 came at about 1:20 a.m., when Champlain residents reported that the parking garage had collapsed. A woman standing on her balcony called her husband, who was on a business trip, and said the swimming pool had fallen into the garage.
Then, in an instant, a section of the L-shaped building fell straight down. Eight seconds later, another section followed, leaving 35 people alive in the standing portion. In the initial hours, a teen was rescued, and firefighters believed others might be found alive. They took hope from noises emanating from inside the pile that might have been survivors tapping, but in retrospect the sounds came from shifting debris.
Rescue crews worked tirelessly, even when smoke and heat from a fire inside the building's standing portion hampered their efforts. They persisted when the temperatures pushed into the upper 90s (35 Celsius) under the blazing sun, some toiling until they needed IVs to replenish fluids. They carried on when Tropical Storm Elsa passed nearby and dumped torrential rain. They left the pile only when lightning developed.
The portion of the building that remained standing posed another grave threat as it loomed precariously above the workers. Authorities ordered it demolished on July 4.
In the end, crews found no evidence that anyone who was found dead had survived the initial collapse, Cominsky said.
Toronto police are investigating a shooting that took place outside of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion early Tuesday morning, a source tells CP24.
Sporting mullets, Canadian Armed Forces officer cadets placed second in an annual military skills competition in the U.S.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Movement is movement, right? Not exactly. Here’s what your body is looking for in addition to your morning walk or yoga session, according to experts.
The Met Gala and its fashionista A-listers on Monday included Jennifer Lopez, Zendaya and a parade of others in a swirl of flora and fauna looks on a green-tinged carpet lined by live foliage.
Quebec is looking at tightening the regulations around sperm donation in the province following the release of a documentary that revealed three men from the same family fathered hundreds of children.
The rumours are true: Vegetables aren't real — that is, in botany, anyway. While the term fruit is recognized botanically as anything that contains a seed or seeds, vegetable is actually a broad umbrella term.
Noelia Voigt, who was crowned Miss USA in November 2023, has announced she is resigning from her role, saying the decision is in the best interest of her mental health.
Sure, she was a royal princess and all. But there’s no way Sleeping Beauty — either before or after her nap — ever had quite the fabulous wardrobe that’s been assembled at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.