CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand (AP) — The baby boy who is the youngest known victim of New Zealand’s earthquake disaster was its first laid to rest, given a farewell Monday by grieving relatives who clutched stuffed toys and draped his tiny coffin in a comforter.
Baxtor Gowland, 5 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 told The Associated Press. 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 over 150 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 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 to the AP thanking people from New Zealand and around the world for their support but asking for privacy during the funeral.
The death toll reached 154 early Tuesday “and we expect that to continue climbing, unfortunately,” Police Inspector Russell Gibson said.
More than 50 victims are still missing a week after the quake devastated the city.
New Zealanders planned to observe two minutes’ silence from 12:51 p.m. local (23:51 GMT Monday) to mark one week since the magnitude 6.3 quake hit, killing up to 200 and turning much of central Christchurch, the country’s third biggest city, into a heap of rubble.
“We have lost people, the city is wrecked, it will be a moment of emotion and pain,” Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker 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 120 people inside.
Up to 22 other people may be buried in rubble at Christchurch Cathedral, most of them believed to be tourists climbing the bell tower for its panoramic views of the southern New Zealand city.
Distraught relatives, including many who flew in from overseas last week, met with officials again on Monday hoping for news on the identification process.
“The waiting is the agonizing part,” 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.
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 120 million New Zealand dollars ($90 million) to help pay salaries for some 50,000 people unable to go to work because of damage from the quake.
“It is designed to immediately put money into peoples’ pockets and give them some confidence,” Key said at a news conference in Wellington after a Cabinet meeting.
Key also said the expected economic cost of the earthquake saying was “in the order” of NZ$20 billion ($15 billion).
Analysts had earlier put the cost at up to $12 billion.
He has vowed that Christchurch will be rebuilt, and to building standards that can withstand major earthquakes.
Many of the buildings that collapsed or were badly damaged were built before New Zealand upgraded building codes to guard against quake damage in the 1970s.
- KRISTEN GELINEAU