1988 La Tienda Amigo Store Downtown Collapse - Video, photos and personal accounts

Published on Apr 5, 2012

This was the building that collapsed after 2 inches of rain in 30 minutes. The roof collapsed. There were 14 people killed in the collapse. People were trapped for over 24 hours. Video by John Wells Las Vegas, NV. Please like the video after viewing it.

Mayor Ignacio "Nacho" Garza interviewed by Peter Torgenson.  Video is tv-safe video footage but don't watch if you are still deeply affected by this.  I had just moved here and this was one of more "bad news" from Brownsville to soon make national headlines followed by a hurricane and then Mark Kilroy murders. My re-introduction to Brownsville, Texas was May 28, 1988.

I later met the girl who was pulled from the rubble while working in a Brownsville museum.  Her name was  Martita Mendoza Acosta and she was all grown up in college and wanted to know if we had a newspaper clipping of her on the front page of the Herald.  This was in 2006 I think....

... here it is.  She later contacted us at Brownsville Station Facebook page and shared two other photos from Matamoros newspapers.

July 8, 1988 Brownsville Herald photo by Brad Doherty

 Martita Mendoza Acosta

 Martita Mendoza Acosta

I think former Brownsville Police Chief Victor Rodriguez makes a sneek peek at the camera during the rescue footage.

Remember Peter Torgenson won the lottery and quit his job?

Read some of the comments under the video when watching on YouTube

If I get any of this info wrong holler at your computer monitor.  :D

The collapsed 13th Street wall (exposure 4) that had to be broken into small pieces for victim location and removal.  (Photo provided by the Edinburg, Texas, Fire Department)

A view of the 13th Street wall (exposure 4) looking toward the rear of the building.

A backhoe used to cart away debris from the front wall.

Operations continued into the night. Floodlights were set up to assist in the rescue.

Small baskets were used in hand digging operations.

Rescue workers were protected from the hot sun and intense heat with an open tent.

A hand line is operated during cutting operations at the rescue site.

A second victim being removed from the rubble.

A triage and mini-emergency room set up in a vacant store across from the collapse.

United States Fire Administration
Urban Search and Rescue
in Brownsville, Texas, Following
a Commercial Building Collapse
July 7, 1988

(Photos provided by the Edinburg, Texas, Fire Department)

--> FA-123 November 1992 FEMA <--- click on that for pdf document

1988 Houston press photos 

Memorial service for victims of Brownsville roof collapse in Brownsville Texas

‘It was a horrific feeling'

Posted: Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:00 am | Updated: 10:43 am, Fri Feb 8, 2013.

By LAURA B. MARTINEZ, The Brownsville Herald

The Rev. Tom Pincelli was about to leave his church on a rainy July afternoon when he got word of a building collapse in downtown Brownsville.

Pincelli, then pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church near downtown, was asked by his Diocese office to rush to the scene. Although accustomed to facing difficult situations, he wasn't quite prepared for what he would encounter on that steamy afternoon 20 years ago this month.

La Tienda Amigo, across the street from the Gateway International Bridge, had collapsed into a huge heap of debris after a brief but torrential summer downpour. The store had stood for decades, a popular discount-clothing store where many local residents had shopped in the days before power retail centers and expansive malls.

But on that day, July 7, 1988, when the rains came, the store tumbled - and Rev. Pincelli was overwhelmed by what he saw when he got to the corner of Elizabeth and 13th streets. La Tienda Amigo was no more than a giant mound of debris, trapping dozens of shoppers and others seeking refuge from the rainstorm.

Following a firefighter into what remained of the old store, Pincelli walked into one of the worst disasters Brownsville had ever seen, or experienced.

"I could hear the screaming as I was walking in," said Pincelli, now a pastor in Harlingen. "When they (firefighters) put the light on, all I could see were these hands sticking up from the rubble. It was a horrific feeling."

For the next three days, firefighters and rescue workers converged on the disaster site, doing all they could to find survivors while making the grim discoveries of those who had perished under the rubble. The collapse of La Tienda Amigo would leave 14 people dead, 47 others injured, and enduring memories of tragedy and grief for those lost while marveling at how a city rallied to help those in need.

Witnesses now recall the real-life drama of heroic rescue efforts. Onlookers and rescuers cheered and clapped when those working tirelessly to find survivors pulled out a live victim. The elation, however, would fade to dark silence when the next body recovered was simply a recovery.

Rev. Pincelli would spend nearly all of three days at the site, taking brief breaks at a nearby triage center. When he would reach someone trapped in the debris and crying out for help, the Catholic priest would identify himself and begin to pray with the victims.

"It was to give them a sense that there were people around working to get them out," he said. "It was to trust as much as they could God's presence in their lives."

Working To Save Lives

Ben Reyna can't drive past the intersection of 13th and Elizabeth streets without remembering what happened that day 20 summers ago.

Reyna, then a Brownsville police officer, would go on to become the city's police chief, and then eventually be appointed by President George W. Bush as director of the U.S. Marshals Service. In 1988 Officer Reyna came upon a chaotic scene in the city's downtown after the collapse of a store where his parents took him to shop in his childhood.

"Nobody could tell us who was in the store; the scene was quite difficult to comprehend just not knowing how many people had been trapped and how many had been hurt," said Reyna, who today is special assistant for federal relations at the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

On that summer afternoon, shoppers had rushed to the store seeking shelter from a driving rainstorm. Many stood underneath La Tienda Amigo's awning. They were unaware that water accumulating on the store's roof would eventually be too much for the three-store building to bear.

When the store came crashing down, La Tienda's front wall blew out and the sidewalls collapsed, trapping dozens inside. In a matter of minutes, police, fire and EMS personnel, along with ordinary citizens rushed to the collapsed building, trying to rescue those inside.

Firefighters from throughout the Rio Grande Valley would speed to the scene, providing invaluable help. Rev. Pincelli recalled that many of the firefighters didn't want to take breaks from rescue efforts because they wanted to save people trapped underneath the rubble. The firefighters were sweaty, dirty and covered in mud as they worked through the rubble. They were wiped down with towels drenched in water by volunteers who stood behind them.

"They were soaking these guys (firefighters) down to keep them cool," Pincelli said.

Medical personnel would take the blood pressure of the rescue workers while they worked. Pincelli recalled the concerns over the well being of the rescuers because of their refusal to take breaks as they worked to save lives.

"They (triage nurses) came to me and said, ‘Father, you've got to go up there and get these guys off the pile because they are going to die up there.'

"I would go up and I would plead with them and plead with them (to rest)," Pincelli said. "Every once in awhile I would get one that would come off. He would sit inside for five minutes and say, ‘I can't do this. I've got to go back.' "

When asked, Pincelli would accompany firefighters as they worked inside the crumbled building. The priest would try to assure the people pinned under the debris that help was on the way. He handed plastic rosaries to victims he could reach as he prayed with them. Pincelli asked other clergymen to bring rosaries, holy cards or little crucifixes, whatever they could find so he could give them to the victims.

Pincelli remembers praying with not only the victims, but also the families and volunteers during the rescue and recovery efforts. He prayed with a father who rejoiced in the rescue of his daughter, but also they mourned the loss of his wife and son who were killed in the building collapse.

"It was extremely difficult to have to watch the terror that he was facing," Pincelli said.

Finding Chaos and Destruction

Patricia Gonzalez Portillo was in her freshman year at the University of Texas at Austin and had returned home for the summer. She and her brother, Dr. Victor M. Gonzalez Jr., were in McAllen when her brother got the call that his help was needed in Brownsville.

It's hard to explain in words what she saw, Gonzalez said, when she and her brother arrived at the disaster scene.

Gonzalez Portillo, who later worked as a reporter and editor at The Brownsville Herald, remembers hearing the screaming and crying of the victims' families as they identified the dead and awaited word of missing loved ones.

"It was painful to see," she said. "It was this kind of thing that as a journalist you want to cover but not in your own community. It was happening to my people and my community."

Gonzalez Portillo immediately pulled out her camera and started snapping away. She photographed everything she saw, capturing one of her hometown's worst disasters.

"I remember seeing my brother's tired face, but he kept working to get the people out," she said.

Brownsville's mayor in 1988, Ygnacio "Nacho" Garza, would also become a community leader linked to the La Tienda Amigo tragedy. For those three awful days, he helped lead and organize efforts, staying well into the night and early morning hours as rescuers worked under portable lights to save victims.

The mayor had just celebrated the 73rd birthday of his father, legendary federal judge Reynaldo G. Garza, at his parents' home and was driving to the downtown area for a meeting on the afternoon of July 7.

"It started raining heavily. The streets were flooded," Garza said.

He had pulled into the IBC Bank parking lot on Elizabeth Street when a bank secretary ran to his car and relayed a message to him that La Tienda Amigo had collapsed.

"I drove down, parked my car and walked down there, and at that time it was pretty chaotic," Garza said. "There were ambulance, police and people taking the injured away, and there were people who (were) crushed and dead on the sidewalk."

Medical personnel told him they needed to set up a triage post nearby. He immediately designated a store across the street from the building as the triage site. A temporary morgue was set up near the Jacob Brown Auditorium.

"It was pretty amazing to see this building that had collapsed to a pile of rubble - it was pretty shocking," Garza said.

A few months before the collapse, Garza had attended a national mayors' conference that focused on disasters such as building collapses and hurricanes. He attended the session on hurricanes given Brownsville's proximity to the Gulf of Mexico, but a quick view of the La Tienda collapse made him wish he had attended the other session.

"As I walked up to the scene I thought I should have gone to the session on building collapses," he said.

Grace Under Pressure

Reyna had served in the Brownsville Police Department for 12 years and had seen the generosity of his hometown many times over. He saw it again in the way Brownsville responded to the La Tienda Amigo tragedy.

A call came over his police scanner that heavy equipment was needed at the building collapse site. The call came shortly after he came upon some workers with a backhoe at Elizabeth Street and Palm Boulevard, a dozen blocks away.

"Without hesitation," he said, one of the men began driving the backhoe to the accident site with Reyna hanging on. The police officer jumped on and off the backhoe to help direct traffic as the driver churned his way up Elizabeth Street. Reyna guided the backhoe driver through each intersection until they reached their destination.

Reyna recalls people from throughout the community offering to help. Local residents donated water, food and other items to exhausted volunteers. Reyna remembers a woman approached him carrying a brown paper bag.

"She told me in Spanish, ‘I don't know what I can do to help, but I have some flour tortillas here with beans and I know that many of you that have been here haven't eaten and this is all I can do,' " he said. "I will never forget that."

"This (disaster) was something the city of Brownsville has never experienced and we dealt with it as a community," Reyna said.

Joseph Horn was one of the Brownsville firefighters at the scene. Horn and other firefighters used an audio and video camera to look for survivors underneath the crumbled building. They had to use their hands to dig through the debris in case they came upon the injured victims.

"If you used heavy equipment it could crush them or move them around," Horn said, explaining the precautions.

Search and rescue dogs were brought in to help in the rescue. When rescuers thought they heard a sound coming from underneath the debris, there was complete silence. All equipment and air conditioners from nearby stores would be shut off and no one in the crowd would utter a word.

Horn was part of a human chain that passed down from person to person large baskets carrying those who were injured in the collapse.

"They are coming out," is what the emergency personnel were told as another victim was brought out from the rubble. He remembers seeing two children pulled from the debris. One had a twisted leg.

"I always wondered what happened to them. How they turned out, if they were able to actually walk again. I never heard another story of what happened to them," Horn said.

Thirteen lawsuits would be filed over the collapse of La Tienda Amigo. All litigation in the matter was settled in 1990 after a $33 million settlement was reached. Today, another store sits at Elizabeth and 13th streets, taking the place of the long lost La Tienda Amigo.

In the immediate aftermath of the building collapse of two decades ago - and after all of the debris had been cleared away and rescue efforts ended - funerals and memorial Masses were held throughout the city to honor and mourn those who had perished. As the city's mayor, Garza attended many of these services.

At one such service, the family of a woman killed in the store collapse wanted to talk to the police officer who had tried to rescue the victim. The family, Garza said, wanted to know what her last words were before she died.

The family and officer met and they learned what their mother's last words were.

"The family is crying, I'm crying and the officer's crying," Garza said. "As big of a tragedy (as) it was, Brownsville could be proud because of the way Brownsville reacted."

The following is the list of those who died in the July 7, 1988, collapse of La Tienda Amigo in downtown Brownsville, according to Brownsville Herald archives.

Israel Carrera - Mexico

Leticia Carrera - Mexico

Martha Minerva Saenz Pena - Mexico

Blanca Fabiola Avalos Colunga - Mexico

Mya Mena - Brownsville

Paloma Blanca Lira - Brownsville

Maria Dolores Acosta - Brownsville

Anotonia Reyes de Acosta - Brownsville

Juan R. Perez - Brownsville

Marisela Villarreal de Rivera - Mexico

Graciela Cortinas de Lopez - Mexico

Bertha C. Muzquiz - Brownsville

Rosalio C. Ortiz - Mexico

Martha Idalia Alvarez de Munoz - Brownsville 

Posted: Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:00 am | Updated: 10:43 am, Fri Feb 8, 2013.

 1988 Press Photo Parents of Building Collapse Victims in Brownsville, Texas

 1988 Press Photo Workers Hold Up Pieces of Collapsed Building in Brownsville, TX

1988 Press Photo Workers Search For Bodies In Rubble of Building, Brownsville TX

 1988 Press Photo Jose' Hinojosa & Tamara Cowen Set Up Triage Brownsville, Texas
1988 Press Photo Workers Rest on Cots Near Building Collapse, Brownsville, Texas

1988 Press Photo workers search for bodies in the rubble, Brownsville, Texas

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