Pisco, Peru – More than 300 relatives and friends filled the towering colonial-era adobe church to pay tribute to the family patriarch, Alejandro Espino, a popular man who managed a fleet of minibuses and succumbed to a heart attack at age 67.
Just as the Mass was ending, the earth began to heave and the church collapsed. Two minutes later, hundreds of friends and distant relatives were dead or dying in a giant pile of rubble.
But Espino’s immediate family – all three generations – survived unscathed.
“It was a miracle of God,” Espino’s widow, Dora, said days after Wednesday’s magnitude-8 earthquake, which leveled 85 percent of this city of 90,000. At least 540 people were killed.
“The movement was up and down, up and down. The earth jumped. Then, it changed direction,” swaying laterally, said the Rev. Alfonso Berrade, 67, who was in the priests’ residence across a courtyard.
Screaming, people ran for the exits or clung to columns flanking the pews. Espino’s family stayed put.
“We didn’t run. We just hugged each other,” said Vilma Espino, 38. “We hugged one another while everything fell all around.”
First the roof. Then the walls – all four stories’ worth.
Dozens of people were killed instantly.
The Espinos went to work saving whom they could. Vilma’s husband pulled out about 40 people, she said.
They worked all night but could not reach many of the buried, whose groans and ever- fainter pleas for help could still be heard when the first official rescue teams arrived the following morning, family members said.
Officials on Sunday said they have given up hope of finding survivors and are now working to recover bodies.
