Condo collapse survivor Steve Rosenthal filed a lawsuit Sunday and shared his experience during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Faulkner Focus.”
“All you could do is go to the balcony and wait for your rescue,” Rosenthal recalled.
Raysa Rodriguez is also filing a lawsuit against the condo association that ran the property in connection with the building’s collapse. She remembers sleeping inside the Champlain Towers condo building when it began to collapse last Thursday morning.
“Something woke me up, and I found myself in the middle of the room,” she writes in a newly filed lawsuit.”The building swayed like a sheet of paper.”
Rodriguez’s lawyer, Adam Moskowitz, claims his client had been waving “red flags” about the safety conditions of the building “for months,” submitting complaints and photo evidence of cracks and other structural damage.
“Nobody seemed to take any of this seriously, unfortunately,” said Moskowitz.
In her lawsuit, Rodriguez describes the series of events as she tried to figure out what was happening.
“I ran to the balcony. I open the doors, and a wall of dust hit me,” Rodriguez wrote in the lawsuit. “I couldn’t see anything outside.”
She somehow managed to get out of her unit to see a concrete column had entered the hallway and the doors to the elevator shaft were gone.
She knocked on neighbors’ doors but received no answer. She quickly began to recognize the magnitude of what had just happened to the building.
“I screamed in horror,” she writes and recalls her brother on the phone yelling, “Get out of there, get out!”
Rodriguez also remembers hearing a woman’s voice calling to her from underneath the debris.
She heard the woman shouting, “Please help me! Please help me! Don’t leave me here!”
“I couldn’t see her,” Rodriguez said. “There were no lights.”
Later, she describes following several neighbors as they made their way down a stairwell in the portion of the building that was still intact.
When they reached the ground floor, the exit was blocked by rubble so they made their way to the basement parking garage which was flooded.
When they eventually found their way to the 2nd-floor firefighters rescued them via a neighbor’s balcony.
