Champlain Towers South: A Florida woman saw a crack forming in her apartment and said to herself, “You have to run to save your life.”

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Her credit cards were already in her bag, and she checked her balcony door, she couldn’t find the stairs at first: all the details she and her son had added to save her life.

Montegodo is a survivor of a partial building collapse last week. Rescue teams are still searching through the rubble, and have recovered 18 people who were killed, hoping to find answers to the families of the 145 people still missing. Investigators are at the scene to try to discover the cause of the panic.

Montegodo told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that the night before the breakup, she put her pills and credit cards in her purse and lit the Lady Guadalupe candle, a Catholic icon that symbolizes protection from bad things.

She went to bed, but at about 1:00 AM woke her up by what she called “rare force”.

Thinking the feeling came from the open balcony door, she went into her living room to try to shut it down. But then, behind her, she saw a crack coming from the ceiling, and it quickly crept down the wall and quickly opened up.

“Something in me said I run,” said Montegodo. “You have to run to save your life.”

She said that in moments she put on the first clothes she found, grabbed her phone and handbag, put out the candle and walked out of her apartment.

As soon as she reached the hallway, she found calm: no panic, no alarms, and no one else to run.

She knew not to take the elevator but didn’t know the emergency stairs were next to her unit, so she went to the furthest set of stairs instead.

“If I had known that, I would probably have picked it up,” Montegodo said.

But as she flew up the six-story staircase begging God to let her see her children and grandchildren again, she heard the sound of the tower she was living in collapsing. Her son said that if she had been on the stairs closest to her house, she would most likely have been crushed.

“She had to get up early the next day, the next morning,” said her son Andres Alvarez. “She didn’t take her sleeping pill because she was afraid she would sleep too much. If it wasn’t for that open door… if it wasn’t for that wind… if she didn’t see this break… she wouldn’t be here to tell the story.”

Montegodo said she is now safe, but mourns for her neighbors who went missing in the building she moved into six months ago. Her move came after 40 years of living in Miami, where she told her friends that she would one day live in the South Champlain Towers.

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