A five-year-old Brazilian child and his father, Italian Alfredo Leone, are among those missing in the partial collapse of a beachfront condominium in Miami. The boy’s mother, Raquel Oliveira, was visiting family in another Colorado town around the time of the collapse.
On her Facebook profile, she says her husband and son were asleep when the building collapsed and that she is waiting to hear from them.
“For now, we can do nothing but wait. I know everyone wants to hear the news with great anxiety, but I can’t answer everyone and I get more and more anxious with so much information and questions. I have no answers, ”he wrote.
“Thank you for everything everyone does, I feel very supported. At the moment, I don’t really need anything, you just have to know them. My whole life was in this apartment, ”he added.
This Friday (25), the death toll rose to four, and more than 150 people are still missing as rescue teams comb through tons of debris, with trained dogs and sonar, looking of survivors.
Search teams detected tapping noises and other noises, but no voices coming from the debris pile hours after much of the Champlain Towers South condominium collapsed in the town of Surfside, north of Miami Beach.
Images captured by a nearby security camera showed an entire side of the building collapsing into two sections, one after the other, raising clouds of dust around 1:30 a.m. (2:30 GMT) on Thursday.
What caused the 40-year-old building to collapse within seconds is still a mystery, although local officials have said the 12-story tower was under construction in some areas.