Turkish authorities left retired prison officer Suleyman Samar for dead in the crushed concrete and twisted metal of his collapsed apartment block, before his unwitting saviour rolled in on an excavator.
Mr Samar was buried alive for 88 hours near the body of his mother in the ruins of their second-floor flat, in the devastated port city of İskenderun in the Hatay Province of south-east Türkiye.
The man in his 60s was straddled between a tipped sofa and a collapsed wall on Thursday afternoon, more than three days after the earthquakes that killed 25,000 and left millions homeless in Türkiye and neighbouring north-west Syria.
But a new threat loomed just metres away from him. The digging bucket of an excavator was about to plunge into the wreckage.
The machine's operator, Sinom Cente, had driven with 10 excavators from the nearby city of Adana to help find survivors, beating official rescue workers.
They failed to arrive in the badly hit Hatay region for days, fuelling boiling anger against the Turkish government among survivors who were forced to search for loved ones on their own.
With still too few rescuers in the quake zone and a faltering government response, survival for those buried alive now depends on a stroke of luck.
Just before the digging started, a voice rang out
When Mr Cente rolled in to remove the rubble from Mr Samar's building, police gave him the all-clear.
"The police came with dogs and told us there was no one alive on the site," said Mr Cente.
"But relatives came to us and said there might still be someone alive, so please be careful with the excavator."
Mr Samar's family frantically intervened, shouting into the rubble to ask if anyone was alive.
A frail voice emerged from within, triggering a meticulous rescue operation.
As the operation continued for hours under the sleeping arm of the excavator, Mr Samar could be heard yelling that it was becoming harder to breathe.
Amid his pleas to pull him out, rescuers moved carefully, retrieving children's books, a kitchen pot and — with cautious handling — a Koran.
They drilled a hole through the wall against which his head was pressed, fearing any false move could send it crashing down on him.
His family, already grappling with a mountain of grief, watched anxiously in a crowd of onlookers desperate for some happy news.
"When people talk to him, he's saying, 'I'm OK, I'm good'," said his nephew, Emre Insaat.
"Maybe, psychologically, he's trying to keep up morale, but we don't know."
Unbeknownst to Mr Samar, at least four members of his family had already been found dead in the ruins of İskenderun over the past four days.
Fears grow of a second disaster
Nearby, the hospital was so overwhelmed by the influx of corpses that a rancid stench wafted from the emergency room doors.
Dead bodies arrived every few minutes in vans, utes and wooden carts, followed by the wails of grieving families.
One woman cried for her daughter, "my angel, my angel".
A family held another woman back as she fought to rush toward a corpse bound in blankets, demanding to see her brother one last time.
At the side door of the hospital, exhausted doctors took a break, while a couple on a motorcycle stopped to ask for antibiotics and continued on their desperate search.
Medicine is running out across the city.
Families sleep on mattresses in the middle of the day, with nowhere to take shelter.
Others bed down in freezing temperatures at night, in cars or gather around fires in disused buildings.
There are so many survivors with no shelter, electricity, communications, fuel or running water in Türkiye and Syria, that the World Health Organization fears a secondary humanitarian disaster could kill even more people than the earthquakes.
Grief gives way to anger
As the mission to reach Mr Samar continued into the evening, local man Erdi Ikizoglu entered the crowd and found himself stuck staring at the cautious operation.
Mr Ikizoglu had just wandered miserably from another search of wreckage in which his relative was missing, after emergency workers gave up on the hope of finding survivors.
"We are here to have some good news because we need to smile," he said.
"There are no words to describe the feelings of everyone here."
Days earlier, he had pulled his father's corpse from the rubble of his home on his own because rescuers had not yet arrived.
Mr Ikizoglu, a surveying engineer, was among a chorus of critics who said shoddy construction standards and corrupt operators were to blame for the collapse of thousands of buildings.
"You can see that many here didn't use the right building standards, because this one is collapsed while the next is still standing," he said.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has acknowledged some "shortcomings" with the quake response, notably getting aid into a region where transport links were damaged.
But in his first national televised address after the quake hit, he warned that he was "going to keep record of all the dissenters and all the lies and fake news spreaders out there".
Mr Erdoğan, who has led Türkiye for 20 years, was already facing a difficult election this May because of the country's profound economic crisis.
But the quake might make things worse.
Criticism of the government is usually muted in Türkiye, where public protests are banned and dissent is muzzled, but survivors of the quakes are surprising themselves with the stridency of their anger.
Mr Izikoglu said the rescue operations and disaster preparations in Türkiye were "completely insufficient", despite the country's tragic history of earthquakes.
"There is a very big lack of coordination," he said.
"There are thousands and thousands of aid trucks coming and they don't know where to drop their equipment or materials.
"There is so much machinery waiting to be directed, but it's really too late. These operations should have been done two days ago, not today."
About eight hours after the rescue operation began, Suleyman Samar was finally pulled from the rubble to the sound of cheers and whistles.
Rescue workers joined hands to form a human corridor through which he was carried on a spinal board into an ambulance.
Remarkably, doctors discovered he had only minor scratches and kidney issues from dehydration, as well as damage from a mouthful of dust.
"He had so much dust in his nose and mouth that it was getting harder to breathe," his nephew Emre said.
"And he said, 'if you didn't make it tonight, I wouldn't have made it. I couldn't hold myself together.'"
Remarkably, even six nights after the earthquakes, more victims were still found alive in the rubble.
But with so many more lost to an inadequate response, the Turkish government faces a fury that it could not have predicted a week ago.
