Hours of anguish for parents at collapsed school
Students among more than 230 killed; hopes of finding survivors dim
Gustavo López recognized the boy’s clothes first.
His tiny frame, pulled from the wreckage, lay over the jagged pieces of what remained of the school. It was his 7-year-old son.
He sat in shock for hours, quietly trying to maintain strength for his 9-year-old daughter, who had escaped unharmed. He wondered how to tell her that her brother, also named Gustavo, was dead — one of at least 30 children who perished at the Enrique Rebsamen school after it collapsed in the earthquake that devastated Mexico on Tuesday, killing at least 230 people.
López waited there for his cousin, Mauricio, who loved the boy and often took him on bike rides and to the movies. By the time Mauricio arrived a few hours later, hundreds of medical personnel, rescuers, volunteers and families were racing around, trying to unearth students still buried in the rubble.
“He was my son, too,” Mauricio screamed when he heard the news, collapsing as López tried to console him. “I can’t bear this, I can’t!”
Such screams of anguish rose above the clamor at the school overnight, markers of loss in the chaotic crowd. Parents climbed trees and playground equipment to get a better vantage of the rescue effort, clinging to the hope that their children would emerge unscathed.
Many did, having rushed out before tumbling walls could trap them. Passers-by had also raced to the school immediately after the quake to pluck students from the cavities of the buckled structure.
But as the day and night wore on, mostly lifeless bodies were pulled from the wreckage, their names recorded by an army of volunteers. By Wednesday night, five people were known to be still missing, including one student who officials said was alive but trapped as rescuers raced to reach her. Hope was dwindling that any more children would be found alive.
The death toll across the country — in Morelos, Mexico state, Puebla and Mexico City — is expected to rise even higher as the rescue efforts slowly transition into recovery efforts, and more of the missing are marked as dead.
Watching that number climb, hour by hour across the city and the broader earthquake zone, is a nation already in mourning. Two weeks earlier, the largest earthquake in a century hit Mexico, killing at least 90 people and offering a grim foreshadowing of the hardship still to come from this one.
Of the 400 students who attend the school, it was unclear exactly how many made it out of the building when the earthquake struck Tuesday afternoon. The injured, more than 60 of them, were sent to area hospitals, while traumatized parents whisked others to safety.
In the frantic confusion of the rescue operation at the school, there were moments of frightening miscommunication.
After sifting through the rubble for hours, Florentino Rodríguez García was given a sudden ray of hope when a medic said his 9-year-old grandson, José Eduardo Huerta Rodríguez, had been taken to a hospital for injuries.
When he was still unable to find the boy, Rodríguez went back to the school and was approached this time by a nurse who took him by the hand and said the medic had been mistaken. José, she said, was still trapped inside.
He fell back into the crowd of anguished parents congregated outside the school — and waited.
An hour later, there was another glimpse of hope when a rescue worker said the boy had been pulled out alive.
But several hours later, a family member emailed to say that in the chaos, the rescuer had been mistaken. José Eduardo, the relative said, had died before his body was recovered.