A 450kg, bedridden man who had appealed on Mexican television for help tackling his weight problem has died of heart failure, his family says.
Emergency officials had to knock down Jose Luis Garza's bedroom wall and put him in the back of a friend's pickup truck as he fought for his life. The 47-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital in northern Mexico on Tuesday.
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 had always struggled with his weight but fell into a 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.
Family members criticised officials for not moving Garza to a hospital before he became critically ill.
"If he had received support 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 received at home," said Julio Cesar Cano, spokesman for the Nuevo Leon state health department.
"Moving a patient of that magnitude is very difficult."
About 150 friends and family waited for more than four hours at a cemetery in the Monterrey suburb of Guadalupe while carpenters built a special coffin for Garza's burial.
"The family wanted to cremate him but there wasn't an adequate oven for someone his size," funeral home worker Maribel Cantu said. "He is the biggest man we have buried."
Garza's coffin arrived to the cemetery in a white van and 20 relatives and workers lowered it to the ground. His burial was delayed as cemetery workers enlarged the grave.
Uribe, whose record weight of 560kg earned him a place in the 2008 Guinness Book of Records, had 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.
