PETIONVILLE, Haiti — Eric Nicolas heard a crash, then raced across a ravine to see a plume of dust: The school his two sons attend had vanished.

The concrete building collapsed during late-morning classes yesterday, killing 47 people and injuring many more. Rescuers used bare hands to pull bleeding students from the wreckage.

By late afternoon Nicolas learned his 17-year-old son Frantzini had skipped classes and was safe, but 8-year-old Erickson was still among the missing.

Nicolas, a 60-year-old house painter, knew the building had problems. After part of the facade fell eight years ago, its downhill neighbors began selling their homes out of fear of a total collapse. But he wanted to keep his sons close to home, where he would not worry as much about the scourge of child kidnappings.

"They said the school was going to fall. I just never thought it would really happen," he said.

The building's third story was still under construction, and Petionville Mayor Claire Lydie Parent told The Associated Press she suspects a structural defect caused the collapse, not the recent rains.

Police commissioner Francene Moreau says the preacher who runs the church-operated school could face criminal charges.

Parent said roughly 500 students from kindergarten through high school attend the school, College La Promesse, in the hills above Port-au-Prince. She did not know how many were inside when it collapsed late yesterday morning.

An unknown number of children were believed buried in the rubble of the concrete building, and the death toll was likely to go higher, Yphosiane Vil, a civil protection official, told the AP at the scene.

About 39 bodies were brought to a Port-au-Prince morgue and another eight people died at a trauma center.