7-year-old Maui boy burns to death with family fleeing fire

A 7-year-old Maui boy has been found burned to death along with his family inside an incinerated car – one of the many kids feared to be among at least 111 killed.

The harrowing loss was revealed by local kindergarten teacher Jessica Sill, who told the Wall Street Journal that she fears for students who may have been home alone during the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century because classes were canceled due to power outages.

Sill said two of her former students told her that they lost their 7-year-old cousin, who was found dead along with his relatives inside a burned-out car.

The dead boy’s name was not revealed, and it was not immediately clear if it was Tony Takafua, the 7-year-old boy previously identified as having burned to death in a car alongside his family as they tried to flee the flames.

So far, no children are among the first five victims officially identified out of at least 111 killed.

But Hawaii state Rep. Elle Cochran told the WSJ  she fears kids who were home from closed schools will make up a large portion of the final tally — which she fears could rise as high as several hundred dead.

Kelly Gallego, an eighth-grade teacher at Lahaina Intermediate School in the heart of the disaster zone, has been volunteering at local shelters in the hopes of finding some of her missing students.

Follow the latest NYP coverage of the deadly Maui wildfires

“When it comes to thinking about some of those families not being there…I don’t have words to express how much my heart is breaking now,” she told the paper.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green earlier confirmed that search crews have recovered entire families — including children — inside fire-ravaged homes and cars.

“That’s one of the toughest parts of this,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons … we are asking for some patience when going into the ground zero area because some of the sites are too much to share or see from just a human perspective.”

Instead of going to work and school, anguished family members have been making somber pilgrimages to the Maui Police Department Forensic Facility in Wailuku in search of some closure.

Tony Keau told Hawaii News Now that while his 83-year-old mother, Gwendaline, has not been officially named among the victims, he knows in his heart she’s gone.

Keau and his wife showed up to pay their respects outside the morgue, where five refrigerated trucks had been brought in to store the bodies of the victims during the slow identification process.

Michael Richter also arrived at the facility hoping to identify the body of his stepfather, 79-year-old James Smith.

“He’s gone. I just want to identify the body,” said Richter. “[I] haven’t slept in six days … I just want to identify his body and put them at rest.”

As of Thursday, Maui County officials have identified only five of the wildfire casualties as Melva Benjamin, 71, Virginia Dofa, 90, Alfredo Galinato, 79, Robert Dyckman, 74, and Buddy Jantoc, 79, all of Lahaina.

In the week-and-a-half since the unprecedented Hawaii wildfires, just 38% of the burn area had been searched by crews with cadaver dogs, but Maui officials hope to finish combing through the scorched disaster zone by the end of the weekend.