Pablo Rodriguez, whose mother and grandmother are among at least 99 missing, said his mother called him to report "creaking noises" she heard a day before the building collapsed.
"She just told me she had woken up around 3 [or] 4 in the morning and had heard like some creaking noises," he told CNN's Erin Burnett. "They were loud enough to wake her."
"It was like a comment that she made off-hand, like that's why she woke up and she wasn't able to go back to sleep afterwards," he said. "...Now, in hindsight, you always wonder."
Rodriguez said he is holding out hope for the lives of his family members, but that given the nature of the collapse it is increasingly difficult as time passes.
"We are not exactly hopeful," he said. "...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."
Rodriguez then described how his family had just begin to emerge from the hardships presented by Covid-19 when disaster struck again.
"Waves of devastation with troughs of disbelieve," he said, describing his feelings throughout today. "One second you are overwhelmed... and then another you get a semblance of normalcy because... This doesn't happen. Buildings don't just collapse. It's not real. So it's been like that all day."
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