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 clutched 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 hit and mortally injured by masonry shaken loose by the quake that hit with sudden and brutal force last Tuesday, the family said. He died in a 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.
Photo: EPA
Dozens of Gowland’s family and friends, most dressed in black and wearing looped baby-blue ribbons, gathered at a small chapel, where 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 tiny 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 xo,” 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 expressions of 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 there are fears about 50 other people who are unaccounted for, police superintendent David Cliff said.
The multinational team of more than 600 rescuers scrabbling through wrecked buildings in the decimated central area of the city last pulled a survivor from the ruins at mid-afternoon Wednesday, making it six days without finding anyone alive.
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key announced the first package of financial measures aimed to help the stricken city get back on its feet — subsidies for employers worth NZ$120 million (US$90 million) to help pay salaries for some 50,000 people unable to go to work because of damage from the quake. Key also said the expected economic cost of the earthquake saying was “in the order” of NZ$20 billion.
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