Family survives quake during memorial

PISCO, Peru (AP) — More than 300 relatives and friends filled the towering colonial-era adobe church to pay tribute to the family patriarch, a popular man who managed a fleet of minibuses in this dusty port city 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. Miraculously, Alejandro Espino’s family — all three generations of it — survived unscathed.

“It was a miracle of God,” said Espino’s widow, Dora.

The Mass began at dusk Wednesday, paying tribute to Espino, who died in mid-July. The Espino family filled the first two rows of simple wooden pews, with friends and family behind them.

“All the seats were filled,” said Vilma, one of Espino’s seven children. “My father was very dear, very respected.”

As the Rev. Jose Emilio Torres finished the service, a magnitude-8 earthquake struck, leveling 85 percent of this city of 90,000 people and killing at least 540 people.

“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. “I thought I was dead.”

Screaming and begging for mercy, 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. Everything fell inward.

“I thought we were done for,” Torres said in a Lima hospital, where he is recuperating from a broken elbow.

Dozens of people were killed instantly. Some were half-buried, their heads and torsos sticking out of piles of crumbled adobe, chunks of ceiling and splintered wooden beams.

But Alejandro Espino’s family was unhurt: all of his children, his grandchildren, his sons-in-law. Torres also stood, incredulous, choking in dust with the altar boys, the cantor, the sacristan and the lone musician, a guitarist.