Last body out of Mexican rubble
Officials raise death toll from earthquake to 369
MEXICO CITY — The last body known to be trapped in rubble has been recovered two weeks after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake killed at least 369 people in Mexico, officials said Wednesday.
The body was recovered from a collapsed office building in central Mexico City where a steadily dwindling number of families kept vigil as an international assortment of rescuers worked a massive rubble heap.
A massive crane sat idle under gray skies and drizzle as workers began breaking down large tents that had housed relatives of those trapped. A tent set up by the Attorney General’s Office to take DNA samples from relatives still stood beside them.
“Honestly, it’s sad, for the families, for everyone,” said Yosh Corte, a volunteer who had been at the site since shortly after the Sept. 19 temblor.
Corte was one of the few remaining volunteers at a site that once swarmed with hundreds of people. A traffic sign above him still held a black and white sign seeking information on Michelle Fernanda Castillo Rayon, a 23-year-old who worked on the building’s fourth floor.
Her body was one of the 49 later found in the collapsed building.
Roberto Campa, the Interior Department’s deputy secretary for human rights, said via Twitter that the bodies recovered there included 19 women and 30 men.
Trinidad Gutierrez was working about 50 yards away in a piano showroom when the quake occurred. The terrible shaking drove him and others across the street to a fountain featuring a statue of Bacchus just in time to see the office building crumble.
“The dust made it to all of this,” he said with a sweep of his hand. “It completely clouded with dust.”
Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said in a news conference that the office building was the last place in the city where bodies were being recovered.
“We have no reports of missing persons,” he said. Mancera added that all bodies had been identified. He said 16 people injured in the quake remained hospitalized.
The national Civil Defense chief, Luis Felipe Puente, tweeted that the official federal death toll had risen to 369. Of those, 228 were in the capital.