The self-proclaimed pastor of a sketchy Texas church filed a $3.1 million claim against the owners of the Champlain Towers condominium in Surfside, Florida claiming that half a dozen of his parishioners had residences destroyed in the collapse of the towers in 2021, the Miami Herald reports.
Another claimant, a man from Oregon, claims he just happened to take up an offer from a stranger to stay at a friend’s condo in the towers after driving to Surfside, and within minutes, he heard a rumble and then blacked out when a chuck of concrete hit his head. Upon regaining consciousness, he simply left the scene and drove back to Oregon. He never mentioned his experience to anyone prior to filing his claim. “I just want that part of my mind gone,” the 33-year-old Oregon man said in his compensation application. “I wish I could somehow erase that part, but I cannot.”
The claims were filed as part of a class action settlement totaling $1.1 billion designated for claims by survivors and family members of the victims of the building collapse. One of the 741 applications for a share of the settlement, “Rev. Kelly Dean Ph.D.” of Baptist Faith Church in Dallas claimed his alleged parishioners lived in six units in the towers, but the unit numbers on the claim didn’t match any units in any of the complex.
While the claim didn’t name the specific church members impacted nor if they died in or survived the tragedy, the church said it had significant losses from the collapse, including three Ford pickup trucks; 40 laptops; 16 televisions; carpet; a highly-specific $490,481 in church vans, microphones and speakers; and “vital records and furnitures.”
Conveniently for the church, the items could not be recovered: in an email to the Herald, a representative of the church said, “All supporting documents were not recovered at the terrible scenes of the collapse of the building. … There’s no fragments that was [sic] recovered due to extreme hit from the building fall.”
According to the author of the email from “Pastor Landry Oledible” sent to a lawyer assigned by the court to determine the legitimacy of claims, the Rev. Dr. Dean was unavailable for the court hearing. “He’s on life support,” Oledible wrote. “Other pastors are on a tight schedule. … If the court wishes to disallow or deny the [church’s] legal settlement, go ahead. … You don’t need to reply.”
More than 60% of the applications–in excess of 450 claims–were rejected by the court’s receiver. Both the Texas church’s and the Oregon man’s claims were deemed to be fraudulent. The other claims were legitimately tied to the 98 people killed, the scores injured, or those who had lost property in the collapse.