KEY POINTS:
The five-year-old orphaned after a horrific level crossing crash last week has told of "Daddy looking back to check on me" seconds before a train ploughed into the family's car.
And the little girl's aunt has revealed her brother was blind in one eye, which may have obstructed his ability to see the train before it collided with their vehicle last Saturday.
Brent Coombes, 39 and his wife Rene Coombes, 35, of Newlands, were killed when a train hit their car at the Ohingaiti rail crossing near Taihape.
Their only child, Reef, is now being cared for by Brent's younger sister Kim Smith and her husband John.
The Smiths and their two children Callan, 8, and Kiann, 4, have been staying at the Coombes' new home in Wellington since the accident.
They have had little sleep since then, with tomorrow's funeral arrangements to organise, a battle to get Brent's parents to New Zealand for the funeral, and the magnitude of the tragedy to deal with.
It's five days after the crash when the Herald on Sunday visits, and the family are getting ready to take Reef back to school for the first time.
"She doesn't want to go for the whole day and she wants us to be with her, so we're going to go and visit her friends," Kim says.
Reef says she does want to see her best friend, Carter. A television item about the accident the night before meant "all the girls would be chasing me because I was on TV," she says.
The family had watched the item together, "and she had wanted to see it," says John - but a clip showing the mangled car had been heartbreaking. "Reef was saying things like 'it is sad that my mummy and daddy had to die', and 'I've never seen my mummy and daddy die so fast before'."
She had told her aunt she "saw Daddy with blood coming out of his ear", and recalled Brent turning around to check on her moments before the fatal crash, which shunted the Coombes' car 150 metres.
Sunstrike may have been a factor. However Kim says her brother was also blind in his right eye, "and that was the direction the train was travelling in".
"Reef has told us that her mummy and daddy were talking and Rene had said 'Oh I can't see', then Brent had said 'me neither'. She said 'daddy looked back to check on me' and that was when the accident happened."
The Smiths will take Reef back to Auckland on Tuesday, the day after her parents' funeral, and she will be enrolled at Forrest Hill School, which Callan attends and where Kiann will also go when she turns five next week.
"If there's a blessing in this it's her age. She might remember fairly little of what happened," Kim says, "but obviously we'll keep the [good] memories alive.
"We'll have pictures and we want to take what we can back home so we can scatter it around our house so she feels more at home. Before then though, the little girl with the name her parents said was "simply right", wants to see her mum and dad one last time, says Kim.
Brent and Rene will be cremated tomorrow and their ashes scattered in Wellington later in the week when Brent's parents arrive from South Africa. Bill Coombes is griefstricken at missing his only son's funeral - he and wife Jean have spent a week desperately trying to find flights from their home in Kwelera, near East London.
"It's terrible, and we are worried about the little one. But we can't make them wait for us."
A sobbing Jean Coombes spoke of the life her son and daughter-in-law had made for themselves since they met at a party while Rene was still a schoolgirl. Last Thursday would have been the second anniversary "to the day" of the couple's arrival in New Zealand where they had long planned their new life together.
She told of how she had rung the couple's Newlands home to talk to her daughter Kim last week and and got Rene's "little voice on the answering machine... it's still hard to believe. I'm trying to come to terms with it, but it's like we're in limbo."
A trust fund has been set up for Reef. Donations can be made to ASB 123223 0059960 50.
Tragic echoes
Last weekend's tragic crash has brought memories of another, eerily similar event, flooding back to Te Awamutu grandmother Veronica Kerr.
It was Kerr, who in 1993, "adopted" Byron Margolius, an 18-month-old South African toddler orphaned after his parents, both doctors, and four-year-old brother and newborn baby sister were killed when their rental car crashed into a van just south of the Meremere power station.
Kerr, known during the 80s as the "grandmother" of the expatriate South African community, was the first person to get the youngster to respond after the accident.
A photograph of Byron clutching a soft Kiwi she had given to him elicited a huge groundswell of sympathy.
"He was so traumatised, no one could get through to him so I asked if I could visit.
"I spoke to him in Afrikaans and mentioned his Oma [grandmother] and gave him this Kiwi, which he just grabbed and held to his face."
While Byron has lived in Johannesburg with his maternal grandparents Anthony and Marie Tissen since the crash, Kerr, 75, has kept in touch, sending him birthday cards and until he was 10 a Kiwi-related gift every April.
Now 15, he is a typical teenager, she says.
He wants to return to New Zealand, and is considering moving to Australia to live with an uncle, says Kerr.
