1,500 pay final respects at funeral
Three Seventh-day Adventists from Moldova, along with another young musician, were among those killed June 1 when the small bus in which they were riding collided with a tanker truck on a rural road. The truck driver also perished.
Deceased are Tatiana Catana and Viorica Ciobanu, two young musicians; Olga Jentimir, a spouse of one of the musicians and mother of another musician. Her son, Andrei Jentimir, was also a passenger in the minibus, and suffered a broken leg and arm among other injuries. The tragedy also took life of 12-year-old Artur Barba, who was not an Adventist but played in the orchestra.
The victims were from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Ivanovca Noua, Moldova, and were returning from a funeral that had been held in the city of Laloveni.
On June 5, a crowd of 1,500 gathered at the Adventist chapel in Ivanovca Noua to pay their final respects to those who perished. Musicians from the adjacent village Singerei Noi also saluted the victims.
A rescue team and eight emergency cars arrived at accident scene and transported eleven wounded musicians to the hospital. Four of them remain in very serious condition days after the crash. Moldova was stunned by the severity of the crash, and media reports were filled with details for several days.
Moldova, officially the Republic of Moldova, is a landlocked state in Eastern Europe located between Romania to the west and Ukraine to the north, east, and south. The country has a population estimated at 4.1 million, and according to world church statistics, there are about 10,700 Seventh-day Adventist Church members worshipping in over 150 congregations across the country.