Baby Baxtor first quake victim laid to rest

THE baby boy who is the youngest known victim of New Zealand’s earthquake disaster was its first laid to rest, given a farewell by grieving relatives who clutched stuffed toys and draped his tiny coffin in a comforter.

Baxtor Gowland, just 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.

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 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.”

The official death toll from the quake rose to 148 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 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 hoping for news on the identification process.

Two buildings where scores of people were killed had been cleared as safe after a quake last year, an official said.

Separately, Prime Minister John Key said the overall cost of the February 22 and the September 4 quakes would be about NZ$20 billion (€10.9bn), with the second, more destructive, earthquake costing about three-quarters of the total.