http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americas/10/07/mexico.halfton.man.ap/index.html
Story Highlights
* Jose Luis Garza went on Mexican television asking for help
* At funeral, family members criticize officials for not moving Garza to a
hospital
* Official: "Moving a patient of that magnitude is very difficult."
* Heart failure is the cause of death, family says
JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) -- A 990-pound (450-kilogram), bedridden man who had
appealed on Mexican television for help tackling his weight problem died
Tuesday of heart failure, his family said.
Emergency officials had to knock down Jose Luis Garza's bedroom wall and
load him onto the back of a friend's pickup as he fought for his life. The
47-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital in northern
Mexico.
Garza followed in the footsteps of the world's fattest man, fellow Mexican
Manuel Uribe of Monterrey, by taking his weight problem public. Garza
lived
about an hour away from Uribe in the town of Juarez.
Garza said he always struggled with his obesity, but that he fell into a
desperate cycle of depression and overeating nine months ago after his
parents died of natural causes within two weeks of each other. He had been
bedridden for four months.
Garza's condition deteriorated over the weekend as he struggled to breathe
and eat. At his funeral, family members slammed state officials for not
moving Garza to a hospital in Mexico before he became critically ill.
"If he had received sup****t at the time he asked for it, he would still be
with us," said his brother Pedro Garza.
State officials argued there was little they could do.
"The attention he would have received at a hospital would have been the
same he got at home," said Julio Cesar Cano, spokesman for the Nuevo Leon
state health department. "Moving a patient of that magnitude is very
difficult. A normal ambulance won't work."
Uribe, whose record weight of 1,230 pounds (560 kilos) earned him a place
in the 2008 Guinness Book of Records, has claimed to have lost around 550
pounds (250 kilos) by following the Zone Diet invented by Dr. Barry Sears.
Uribe tried to help Garza by sending him kiwis, grapefruit, pears and a
protein supplement. Uribe's fiancee, Claudia Solis, delivered the food on
Friday evening.
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