'Tragedy beyond tragedy': Champlain Towers South was a catastrophe in slow motion

Sara Nir was up late, checking her email when she heard knocking sounds that went from a soft tapping to hard pounding to a frightful crash overhead -- as if a wall had collapsed in the unit above her ground-floor condo. 

Raysa Rodriguez was sleeping in her room on the ninth floor when she awoke disoriented. The building was swaying "like a sheet of paper." She ran into the hallway to find that it had been impaled from floor to ceiling by a concrete pillar; the doors of the elevators were shorn off, exposing the shafts.  Cassie Stratton was on the phone with her out-of-town husband, looking down from her fourth-floor balcony in horror as part of the pool deck below apparently vanished into a sink hole.