The death of a fifth Canadian working for the United Nations mission in Haiti has been made public.
James Coates, an information management assistant, had been working in Port-au-Prince for two years and had an office on the fifth floor of the UN headquarters building that was flattened by the earthquake.
Friends and relatives had been hoping for more than a week that he had somehow survived, but the family received the bad news this morning.
The 37-year-old Mr. Coates grew up in Deer Lake, Nfld., but he had lived and worked on five continents, making him "truly an international citizen" who knew people all over the world, saida friend, Aviva West.
A former freelance reporter and one-time DJ, Mr. Coates had sandwiched his studies at Laval University in Quebec City with sojourns in a village in Togo and a small town in Benin. In addition to English and French, he had learned Vietnamese.
The collapse of the UN offices in the Hotel Christopher has also killed three other Canadian employees: Renée Carrier, a special assistant to the head of the mission, press officer Alexandra Duguay and RCMP Superintendent Douglas Coates (no relation), the acting police commissioner of the UN mission.
Satnam Singh, an IT consultant who was an immigrant living in Montreal, was also killed at Hotel Christopher.
Another Mountie on assignment with the mission, Sergeant Mark Gallagher, died in the rubble of his Port-au-Prince residence.
Tu Thanh Ha