A resident missing in the Surfside apartment collapse told her son the building was making loud “creaking noises” a day earlier, he said.
“She just told me she had woken up around 3, 4 in the morning and had heard like some creaking noises,” her son, Pablo Rodriguez, told CNN on Thursday after part of the 12-story building tumbled to the ground. “They were loud enough to wake her.”
“It was like a comment that she made offhand, like that’s why she woke up and she wasn’t able to go back to sleep afterwards,” he added. “Now, in hindsight, you always wonder.”
Both his mother and grandmother are missing. Rodriguez told the cable network his hope is dimming.
“You always hold out hope, until you definitively know. But after seeing the video of the collapse, it’s increasingly difficult, because they were in that section that was pancaked in.”
About 100 people are missing after the structure near Miami came down with a roar early Thursday.
The building had been sinking for years and was deemed unstable, a researcher at Florida International University told USA Today. He stopped short of saying that was the cause.
“This is an extraordinarily unusual event, and it is dangerous and counterproductive to speculate on its cause,” former Surfside Mayor Daniel Dietch told the newspaper.