Youngest victim of earthquake laid to rest
Source: Agencies |
March 1, 2011, Tuesday
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The baby boy who is the youngest known victim of New Zealand's earthquake disaster was its first laid to rest, given a farewell yesterday by grieving relatives who held stuffed toys and draped his tiny coffin in a comforter.
Baxtor Gowland, five months old, was sleeping in his home in the southern city of Christchurch when he was killed by masonry shaken loose by the quake that hit with sudden and brutal force last Tuesday, the family said. He died in hospital.
Authorities have named just eight victims of the disaster - Gowland and another infant among them - and say they are struggling to identify many of the 140 other bodies pulled from the rubble because of the extent of their injuries.
Dozens of Gowland's family and friends, most wearing baby-blue ribbons pinned to their mourning black, gathered at a small chapel. A slideshow of the smiling infant's photographs flashed on a screen as Sarah McLachlan's song "Angel" echoed throughout the room.
After the ceremony, the white casket, bearing a wreath of white flowers and draped at one end in a light-blue comforter, was carried by a single pallbearer to a waiting car. His mother watched, clutching a dark blue stuffed toy.
"Bax you are forever in our hearts we will always love you so," the boy's father Shaun McKenna wrote on a Facebook tribute page, under a photo he uploaded of his son. "To the little man who made everyone smile who met him, may you look down upon us and help us remember your beautiful face."
Peter Croft, the child's great-uncle, read a statement thanking people from New Zealand and around the world for their support, but asking for privacy during the funeral.
The official death toll from the quake rose to 148 yesterday after another body was found, and grave fears are held for about 50 other people who are unaccounted for, police Superintendent David Cliff said.
Among the dead or missing are dozens of foreign students, mostly Japanese and Chinese, from an international language school inside an office building that -collapsed with up to 120 people inside.
Distraught relatives, including many who flew in from overseas last week, met with officials again yesterday hoping for news on the identification process.
The multinational team of more than 600 rescuers who have been scrabbling through wrecked buildings in the central area of the city last pulled a survivor from the ruins at mid-afternoon local time on Wednesday, making it almost a week without finding -anyone alive.
Baxtor Gowland, five months old, was sleeping in his home in the southern city of Christchurch when he was killed by masonry shaken loose by the quake that hit with sudden and brutal force last Tuesday, the family said. He died in hospital.
Authorities have named just eight victims of the disaster - Gowland and another infant among them - and say they are struggling to identify many of the 140 other bodies pulled from the rubble because of the extent of their injuries.
Dozens of Gowland's family and friends, most wearing baby-blue ribbons pinned to their mourning black, gathered at a small chapel. A slideshow of the smiling infant's photographs flashed on a screen as Sarah McLachlan's song "Angel" echoed throughout the room.
After the ceremony, the white casket, bearing a wreath of white flowers and draped at one end in a light-blue comforter, was carried by a single pallbearer to a waiting car. His mother watched, clutching a dark blue stuffed toy.
"Bax you are forever in our hearts we will always love you so," the boy's father Shaun McKenna wrote on a Facebook tribute page, under a photo he uploaded of his son. "To the little man who made everyone smile who met him, may you look down upon us and help us remember your beautiful face."
Peter Croft, the child's great-uncle, read a statement thanking people from New Zealand and around the world for their support, but asking for privacy during the funeral.
The official death toll from the quake rose to 148 yesterday after another body was found, and grave fears are held for about 50 other people who are unaccounted for, police Superintendent David Cliff said.
Among the dead or missing are dozens of foreign students, mostly Japanese and Chinese, from an international language school inside an office building that -collapsed with up to 120 people inside.
Distraught relatives, including many who flew in from overseas last week, met with officials again yesterday hoping for news on the identification process.
The multinational team of more than 600 rescuers who have been scrabbling through wrecked buildings in the central area of the city last pulled a survivor from the ruins at mid-afternoon local time on Wednesday, making it almost a week without finding -anyone alive.
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