Screaming and small wriggling fingers in the rubble of a collapsed Miami apartment block led a dog walker to hail rescue workers who pulled out a boy on Thursday.
So far 99 people are still unaccounted for and one person has died after the 12-storey building Champlain Towers South Condo, in Surfside fell to the ground.
Rescue workers are working hard with the help of sniffer dogs in perilous conditions to look for survivors.
A British mother and relatives of Paraguay's first lady are among those unaccounted for, reports say.
Amid the horror, one piece of good news was how a young boy was one of the 35 people to have been rescued so far, which was captured on TV.
Nicholas Bilbao was walking his dog at night when he felt the ground shake and witnessed the building collapse.
As a crowd gathered, he and another man went round the back where he began to hear screaming.
“It was eerie, like quiet, still,” he told CNN, “It was almost out of a horror movie.”
Hearing the screams he then saw fingers from underneath the concrete rubble.
"Finally, I got close enough to hear him, and he said, 'Can you see my hand?'." Balboa said. "He was sticking his hand up .... through the debris. And I could see his hand and his fingers wiggling."
Nicholas called over police and rescue workers who were able to get to the boy who had been hiding under a bed.
"He was obviously sleeping," Balbao said. "I can only imagine how many people were in their apartments either sleeping or watching TV or just whatever, just living their lives. Unbeknownst to them the building was about to break away."
Footage shows rescuers reaching an arm and then helping pull out a boy who appeared to be in pyjamas.
He was then taken away on a stretcher.
Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava tweeted that she has signed a “declaration of local state of emergency” that will begin to allocate the necessary resources need to respond to the disaster.
Charles Burkett, the town's mayor warned in a press conference that the building manager told him the tower was quite full and the number of dead was likely to rise.
"It was a complete collapse of the building. I thought maybe a balcony had gone down, but we've got 134 units in that building, I understand, and literally half that building is not there anymore," he said.
A relative of Bhavna Patel, a 38-year-old British and US citizen, told Sky News that she, her 42-year-old husband Vishal Patel, and their one-year-old daughter Aishani Patel are yet to be found.
Meanwhile, Paraguayan Foreign Minister Euclides Acevedo said six people from the South American country are missing, including Sophia Lopez Moreira, sister of first lady Silvana Abdo.
