Surfside condo building ‘swayed like a sheet of paper,’ survivor's lawsuit says: 'I screamed in horror'

Raysa Rodriguez says she was asleep inside the Champlain Towers condo building in Surfside, Florida, when it started to collapse last Thursday morning.

"Something work me up, and I found myself in the middle of the room," she writes in a newly filed lawsuit against the condo association that ran the property. "The building swayed like a sheet of paper."

Details about the lawsuit filed by Rodriguez on Monday were reported Tuesday by WSVN-TV of Miami.

Rodriguez’s lawyer, Adam Moskowitz, says his client had been raising "red flags" about the safety conditions of the building "for months," sending complaints and photos of cracks and other damage to the building association.

"Nobody seemed to take any of this seriously, unfortunately," the lawyer told WSVN.

In her lawsuit, Rodriguez describes what happened as she tried to investigate what was happening.

"I ran to the balcony. I open the doors, and a wall of dust hit me," Rodriguez writes. "I couldn’t see anything outside."

Somehow, Rodriguez recalls, she managed to get out of her unit. She says a concrete column had entered the hallway and the elevator shafts no longer had doors.