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A pitcher for the University of Connecticut baseball team and his family managed to make it out of the condominium complex near Miami moments before its horrific collapse last week.
Justin Willis, his parents and his sister went down 11 flights of stairs at the Champlain Towers complex in Surfside, Fla., after the building started shaking and dust began to emerge early Thursday morning, the 22-year-old athlete told the Hartford Courant.
“Once we reached the beach, it kind of settled in,” Willis told the newspaper, “like, wow, what just happened? I didn’t even think about it in the moment. I didn’t look back at the building.”
Nine people are confirmed dead in the building collapse, with more than 150 unaccounted for.
Willis, who is from the New Jersey town of West New York, was awake after 1 a.m. EDT when the shaking began.
He remembered observing that the apartment next to theirs and two elevators had disappeared by the time his family went outside their apartment, he told the Hartford Courant.
“It felt like a first gust of wind from a storm,” Willis recalled, “then the second one felt kind of like [Super Storm] Sandy, the way I remember it. It kind of seemed normal for the moment. Then the third one felt like a jet took off right on top of our building. I was expecting to see a plane come right over our balcony.”
The family helped an elderly woman get outside after seeing her on the third floor, Willis said.
Willis, whose family was vacationing in Surfside, believes he and his sister were only 15 feet from the 12-story complex when it collapsed.