Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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Che ©amecock Survivor from page A6 in his mouth. Then they attached the hose to an oxygen tank so the young man could ' reathe. Ramos eventually made the hole big ger and told Moreno to stick his arm through it. Ramos inserted an IV tube to provide medicine and nourishment. Slowly, the work progressed. After shocks closed the hole even as the res cuers opened it, and Moreno became more and more frightened. “You stayed here to watch me die,” he told Ramos. “No, I stayed to get you out of here,” the rescuer assured him. Finally, at 6:30 p.m. Saturday — 31 hours after the earthquake — the res cuers pulled Moreno from the rubble. “It was an incredible joy,” Ramos said. “We were all crying and hugging each other.” But out in the open, Moreno took a turn for the worse. The cinderblocks had cut off circulation to his legs, and when his blood began flowing again, his body rejected it. His heart stopped and paramedics got it started again. His kidneys shut down, and they gave him dialysis. Moreno’s parents, an unemployed couple from the small port of Acajutla, 55 miles to the southwest, had rushed to the capital to be near their son. They wept in the hospital waiting room. “The rescue of Seigio was such a joy,” said his father, Juan Moreno. “But then I the complications began.” When he arrived at the hospital, Moreno fell into a coma. His mother talked to him, but his only response was to squeeze her hand, and then he could n’t even do that. “Sergio, my love, we’re here with you. We won’t leave you for a single mo ment,” she told him, crying. On Monday, Moreno lay in intensive care with a neck brace and a respirator and a web of tubes snaking into his arms and torso. Doctors were preparing to am putate his left leg. The attending nurse, who said hos pital regulations prevented her from giv ing her name, said Moreno’s heart was unstable but that his kidneys might start functioning when the shock passed. She said whether he could survive was “a question for God.” Guzman, the rescuer, returned home to find his wife had left him, angry that he had abandoned the family during his 40 straight hours of work. So he went to the hospital to see how Moreno was holding up. His fatigues caked in mud and a suigical mask at his chin, he broke into tears when he saw Moreno’s parents in the waiting room. “Just seeing you moves me,” Guz man said, shaking hands with Moreno’s father. The father tearfully thanked him for his efforts, and Guzman responded, “Don’t thank me. Thank God.” Moreno’s mother, motionless in the waiting room, said there was nothing they could do anymore. “The only thing we can do is wait,” she said, “andaccept.” New Jersey teen says 'Hong Kong official threatened her life by Margaret Wong Associated Press HONG KONG — An official inter preter warned a New Jersey teenager she could “face a firing squad” in China if she didn’t sign someone else’s name to several immigration documents, the young woman testified Monday. Lin Qiaoying told a judge she also was threatened with life in prison in Hong Kong if she didn’t go along with in structions from immigration officials who questioned the validity of her mainland Chinese passport. “I was so scared at the time that I J?urst into tears,” Lin testified at the tri of three officials who allegedly coerced her into wrongly admitting guilt in the October 1999 incident. Lin, who was 16 at the time, falsely confessed to using a bogus passport and was jailed for almost three months be fore it emerged that her travel documents were genuine and she was freed. The case stirred controversy over Hong Kong im migration procedures. Official interpreter Wong Kin-ang and immigration officials Lung Kin sing and Wmg Chui-kam have pleaded innocent to charges of trying to intimi date Lin into making the false confession. The defendants sat impassively in court on Monday as Lin, who lives in New Brunswick, N.J., testified. Lin, who moved from the southern Chinese province of Fujian to the Unit ed States in 1995, stopped over in Hong Kong in late 1999 en route to New York after visiting relatives in mainland Chi na. An immigration official who is not on trial, Chan Man-chung, said he be came suspicious about Lin’s identity when she said her green card, or proof of U.S. residence, was lost. Lin also couldn’t answer his ques tions in English or say what color taxis are in the United States, Chan testified. He then turned her over to the officials. Hong Kong see page as Earthquake from page A6 « With aftershocks as strong as mag nitude 5.4 rattling the unstable mass of soil and nibble on Sunday and again on Monday, there was no safe place to keep the bodies found in the area so far. Some corpses lay peacefully on the pavement as if thevictimsdiad lain down for a nap. Some were covered in trash bags. President Francisco Flores asked Colombia to send 3,000 coffins. Saturday’s quake off El Salvador’s coast was felt from northern Panama to central Mexico—a distance of more than 1,100 miles. Red Cross official Mildred Sandoval said 403 deaths had been confirmed na tionwide. Police also reported 2,000 injured, 4,692 houses destroyed and 16,148 damaged. Most of those still missing were in Las Colinas, located six miles east of San Salvador. 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