By TONY WALL
Buried up to his neck in an avalanche of sand, 12-year-old Karl Schutt could hear the faint cries for help from his best friend, Jesse Levien, below him.
He could do nothing but listen as Jesse, 11, slowly lost his fight for life under a Mangawhai Heads sand dune.
Jesse,
a Matarau Primary School pupil, keen rugby player and budding artist, died about 1 pm on Sunday when a tunnel he had dug in the side of a steep dune collapsed.
The tragedy was tempered by the remarkable survival of Karl, whose tunnel also caved in.
As the school friends from Ruatangata, near Whangarei, were driving to Mangawhai on Saturday with Jesse's mum, Glenys, Jesse told his mate: "I think this is going to be a great weekend."
It started out that way. The trio stayed at the home of Mrs Levien's parents, Barry and Judith MacDonald, and spent Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning playing on their boogie boards.
They swam across the estuary and had fun sliding down the dunes into the water.
Then they started digging holes in the sand, wet from heavy rain.
Jesse had seen a news item on television about a climber who survived for days in a snow cave in the South Island, and pretended he was in his own shelter.
But then Jesse's hole collapsed, sending sand crashing on to Karl's hole and burying him too.
"I just remember blackness," Karl said yesterday.
"I pushed upwards and just my head was sticking out and I was stuck. I could only breathe a little bit at a time."
Karl said he heard faint cries from Jesse.
"I told him to stop moving ... He stopped calling out after about 10 minutes or so and then he said, 'Help,' two or three more times and then he went silent."
Karl spent an agonising hour trapped under the sand before he heard a boat arriving. It was Mrs Levien, who had been searching for the pair and was ferried across the estuary in a dinghy by a local resident.
She found Karl and began digging for Jesse. She found his head about 30cm below the surface and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Residents dragged the boys clear and used CPR to try to bring Jesse around. But it was too late.
Karl was flown to Whangarei Hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia and an irregular heartbeat.
Mrs Levien said the death of her son had still not sunk in.
"It's like this is someone else's nightmare."
By TONY WALL
Buried up to his neck in an avalanche of sand, 12-year-old Karl Schutt could hear the faint cries for help from his best friend, Jesse Levien, below him.
He could do nothing but listen as Jesse, 11, slowly lost his fight for life under a Mangawhai Heads sand dune.
Jesse,
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