A little boy who’s lucky to be alive said he does not know how he managed to survive the horrifying escape from his Mexico City school after a powerful earthquake that killed more than 200 people destroyed the building while he was in the middle of class.
“I was in my English class and the ground started to vibrate,” Luis Carlos Tomé, told NBC News partner Noticias Telemundo on Wednesday, visibly shaking and crying.
Luis Carlos said he noted out loud that the ground was shaking because no alarm had sounded and everyone left the classroom quickly.
“That’s when I made the best decision of my life — which was not to go to the left, which is where everything fell first,” he said, crying. “I went to the right with my friends.”
The boy said he, his friends and others were all going down the stairs when suddenly people started to fall.
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PHOTOS: Desperate Rescuers Dig Through Rubble After Powerful Mexico Quake
“There were many [people on the stairs] but all of a sudden I didn’t see them anymore,” he said.
After he escaped, he said he “could only see how the whole school had fallen.”
Luis Carlos said he looked around and did not see many of his classmates, or his teacher.
“All the dust, we could only cover ourselves,” he added.
The boy then came to the realization that many of the classmates and teachers he knew may already be dead.
“Everything happened so fast, I did not see her,” Luis Carlos said of his teacher. “In about thirty seconds my school was down and I don’t even know how I saved myself.”
Luis Carlos’ mother, who was unidentified, told Noticias Telemundo that she thanked God after she found out both of children survived the massive quake.
“My life came back,” she said.
Rescue workers pulled at least 25 bodies, all but four of them children, from the Enrique Rebsamen school in the south of the capital after it collapsed following the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that rocked Mexico Tuesday afternoon.
Eleven people were rescued from the school, while two children and one adult were still missing, Mexico’s Education Minister Aurelio Nuño said Wednesday morning.
Crews wearing hard hats worked throughout Wednesday to find the missing, and rescuers found a surviving child in the ruins, the Associated Press reported.
Related: Mexico Quake Turns Classroom Into Coffin, Rescuers Scramble for Survivors
Three workers entered the rubble, the AP reported, and spotted the girl. Rescuers had been trying to secure the child for hours, according to the AP.
Dr. Pedro Serrano, one of the volunteers, told the AP that he managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble and made it into a classroom, but found all of its occupants dead.
“We saw some chairs and wooden tables,” he said. “The next thing we saw was a leg, and then we started to move rubble and we found a girl and two adults — a woman and a man.”