Maria del Carmen Castellón, stands with a photo and the welding gear of her late husband, one of six workers killed in the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. At a Sept. 17, 2024, news conference, she called for better working conditions for workers. Photo by Danielle J. Brown
On the afternoon of March 25, Miguel Angel Luna Gonzalez stopped to give his wife a kiss before heading to his construction job, when she noticed a photo of the two of them on his phone.
“That afternoon, before heading into work, he stopped by and gave me a kiss. I noticed in his screensaver, a picture of us, and I was happy,” Maria del Carmen Castellón said Tuesday. “I was not to know that these are the last moments I would share with my husband.”
Hours after that kiss, Gonzalez, a welder, was working on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it was struck by the container ship Dali, sending the center span of bridge plunging into the Patapsco River, killing him and five other workers.
“That day, a wound was opened in my heart that will never heal. Something I do not wish to anyone,” Castellón said through a translator at a Tuesday press conference hosted in Baltimore by the immigrant-advocacy group CASA.