(WSVN) - The Moskowitz Law Firm has released a voicemail recording of a woman’s unbearable moment when she realized the Champlain Towers South building in Surfside was collapsing.
As the building began to fall, 59-year-old Raysa Rodriguez called her brother in a panic. He didn’t answer, but the voicemail, which was released Wednesday, tells her frightening story.
Rodriguez is heard calling out to someone when the alarm went off.
“Anybody over there? Hello? Who’s there?” she yelled after being jolted awake in Unit 907 at Champlain Towers South.
“Yadi! You got him?” she said, asking a friend if she rescued someone.
Rodriguez’s friend is then heard calling her and speaking to her in Spanish, asking where she was.
Rodriguez then responds in Spanish, “Let’s try the stairs,” and switches back to English, “But wait. I heard voices. I gotta check on these guys,” before knocking on the door of one of the apartments.
In a panic, Rodriguez called her brother Fred. It went to voicemail and captured the chaos inside the part of the building still standing.
The alarm sounds off again and Rodriguez screams, “Oh, my God! What the hell! Oh, my God! Yadi! The whole entire building is gone. Hold on, let me check the stairwell. Ada, from downstairs.”
The woman they’re referring to, Ada, is in her 80s and needs her walker, but she was able to be brought down the stairs with the help of other neighbors.
Rodriguez and her neighbors made it out onto the balcony, where firefighters rescued them.
Rodriguez is now suing her condo association.
Her attorney provided video to 7Investigates that she took inside the building’s parking garage nearly three years ago.
Adam Moskowitz said Rodriguez had raised red flags about the conditions, and in a statement said, “This is extremely disturbing video that our client recorded in 2018. It was her effort to truly get somebody to listen to her and other residents, as they found clear examples that the garage was falling apart. No one would look at this video and not think this was a serious problem.”
Meanwhile, Rodriguez said her dearest friends also lived in the building. They are still missing. She said she considers them family and is heartbroken.
After Rodriguez’s brother heard that voicemail on his phone, he posted on Facebook that the entire family spent Father’s Day all together in his sister’s apartment just days prior to the collapse, and he wrote on Facebook, “The thought of that rocks me to my core.”
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