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Then came the dust and dirt, floating into the elevator from the ceiling.

And then came the panic.

The strangers started “freaking out,” the law student, who declined to be identified, told the Tribune. Some were screaming, others crying. Montemayor, who was visiting with his wife from Mexico City, said he and his wife held each other tightly and began to pray.

“I believed we were going to die,” Montemayor told CBS. “We were going down, and then I felt that we were falling down, and then I heard a noise: clack clack clack clack” – the sound of getting trapped in an elevator.

They pressed the emergency button. The six strangers – including Montemayor and his wife, two law students from Northwestern University and two others, including a pregnant woman – were stuck in the elevator for roughly two and a half hours as firefighters tried to figure out a way to reach them.

In the 98 floors, they have no place to open any door? That is the craziest thing

The problem? They were trapped in a “blind shaft,” meaning there were no doors through which firefighters could enter the shaft and get to them, Chicago Fire Department Battalion Chief Patrick Maloney told reporters at the scene, according to ABC 7 Chicago. The malfunction had been caused by a snapped “hoist rope,” or elevator cable, Maloney said. Other cables were still attached, keeping the elevator from plummeting to the floor.

“It was a pretty precarious situation where the cables that broke were on top of the elevator,” Maloney said. “We couldn’t do an elevator-to-elevator rescue. We had to breach a wall on the 11th floor of the parking garage in order to open up the elevator doors.”