He was a father, baseball fan and helped many. He was killed in collapse near Miami Beach
Manuel LaFont owned a condo on the eighth floor of Champlain Towers South, but his second home was about a mile away, on the baseball diamonds at North Shore Park.
You could find him most afternoons playing ball with his son Santi, sharing a lifelong passion with his boy. Manny didn’t push Santi very much. They both loved being out until dark.
“They were out there until the lights went out,” said Danny Berry, director of Miami Beach Youth Baseball League, on Sunday morning. Berry and the whole tight-knit baseball community were coping with the news that they wouldn’t see Manny LaFont again.
LaFont, 54, proud father, coach and a business consultant, lived in unit 801 of the Champlain. He was among three others whose remains were identified Saturday night by police after being pulled from the rubble in the Surfside condo collapse.
LaFont had a 10-year-old son, Santi, and 13-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, Adriana LaFont. Adriana had picked up the kids on Wednesday night, hours before the collapse.
Adriana asked her friends on Facebook to pray the rosary for Manny on Friday. She posted pictures of her family from their years together at the Champlain — baby pictures, birthday parties, beach days and other memories from their life there.
”So many memories inside the walls that are no more today, forever engraved experiences in the heart,” she wrote.
Late Saturday night, Miami-Dade police released the names of four of the five people who were confirmed dead. They are Stacie Fang, 54; Anthony Lozano, 83; Gladys Lozano, 79. LaFont’s remains were found Friday, police said.
Police did not identify the fifth victim. There are still 156 people unaccounted for.
LaFont, a Houston native, coached his son’s baseball team, the Astros at North Shore Park. He was a parishioner at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Miami Beach, where his kids went to school. The parish’s school parents gathered Saturday afternoon to pray for LaFont and his neighbors who were still missing.
An alumnus of Sharpstown High School in Houston, his classmates had been sending Adriana messages of support and closely watching the news, waiting for word on him. Sam Olivares, a fellow Sharpstown grad who’d visited LaFont in South Florida before, told Houston’s KHOU-11 that it was difficult to express the shock LaFont’s old friends felt.
“I was talking to my friend Scott on the phone, and we just sat there in silence. There were no words we could come up with this tragic event, especially with somebody you know,” Olivares said. “And to have kids out there waiting to hear about their dad. It’s just overwhelming.”
LaFont’s baseball family loved his positive attitude — wins and losses didn’t matter as much as personal improvement and a good effort. He was known for texting encouraging audio messages to a fellow parent and coach, Brendan Coyle, so he could play the positive reinforcement for his son. Coyle and LaFont met six years ago when their kids played tee ball.
“Manny also cared deeply about the development of all the kids he coached or came across at the field,” Coyle said. “Even in seasons when we didn’t coach the same team, he would text me all the time to ask how my son Nate or other kids that he had coached were doing.”
LaFont had just started a new job after being out of work for most of the COVID-19 pandemic. The work sometimes took him abroad.
“I was hoping when I heard the news, he was out of town,” Berry told the Miami Herald. “I called his cellphone. It went to voicemail.”
For three years, LaFont worked across Latin American and the Caribbean for a manufacturing firm, leading a division that focused on roadway safety that built crash cushions and movable barriers. At an industry conference in 2016, he gave an interview where he talked about why he got into this line of work.
“I got into this industry specifically because I don’t want to sell widgets. I want to help people. I want to do something good in this world,” he said. “When I die, I want to say that my life meant something.”
