PISCO, Peru &#8212 They filled the towering colonial-era adobe church to pay tribute to a popular man, felled at age 67 by a heart attack in mid-July, who managed a fleet of minibuses in this dusty port on Peru’s southern desert coast.

Three generations of Alejandro Espino’s family filled the first two rows of simple wooden pews for the Roman Catholic memorial Mass. Behind them were some 300 relatives and close friends.

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

The Mass began at dusk Wednesday and just was ending when the earth began to heave.

“The quake was very intense from the first moment,” said the Rev. Alfonso Berrade, the parish chief who was in the priests’ residence across a courtyard. “The movement was up-and-down … Then it changed direction,” swaying laterally.

People ran for the exits or tried to reach and cling to columns in the naves flanking the pews. Dozens made it outside. Then the lights went out.

“We just hugged each other, said Vilma, a 38-year-old primary school teacher and mother of two. “We hugged each other while everything fell all around.”

First the roof. Then the lateral walls – four stories worth.

“I thought we were done for,” said the officiating priest, Rev. Jose Emilio Torres, as he lay in a Lima hospital Saturday, recuperating from a broken elbow.

Some died instantly. Others were half-buried, heads and torsos sticking out of piles of adobe, ceiling and wooden beams.

The Espinos all survived: All five of Alejandro’s grandchildren. All of his sons-in-law, one of whom carried out a crying grandchild just moments before the 8.0-magnitude quake leveled 85 percent of this city of 90,000 people.

Torres stood, incredulous, choking in dust along with the altar boys, the cantor, the sacristan and the guitarist. The atrium above was intact – Its four reinforced concrete columns had held as other pillars disintegrated.

Some of the trapped made desperate cell phone calls from under the rubble. A number were saved. Others died of internal injuries and asphyxiation. No one knows how many – although authorities said Sunday that 135 bodies had been pulled out of San Clemente, the last two before dawn Sunday.

The police went off to guard the two downtown banks – and later exchanged gunfire with people attempting a robbery, the sisters said, leaving the Espinos and a group of youths searching.

The youths found a nephew of Alejandro Espino hugging his 7-month-old boy.

“‘Take my son. Take my son,’ he told them. ‘Then come for me.'” said Vilma. But when they returned, they couldn’t find him. The man, his wife and their three daughters all died, she said. Only the baby survived.

At least 50 members of the Espino’s extended family died for certain, said Vilma and Carmen.

Officials had not yet compiled a list of the dead. Many have already been buried in graves marked only with wooden crosses because cemeteries are overwhelmed and there was no way to refrigerate bodies.

Fighting back tears, Vilma said the family was almost numbed by the overwhelming grief.

“Our bodies have only just begun to hurt,” she said. “We just realized we’re bruised.”