Hundreds of people, many taking pictures, gazed at Walter Hudson's giant body one last time before the half-ton man once listed as the world's heaviest human was buried on Long Island.
The end came Thursday after a four-year journey that had taken an unknown Hudson, confined to his bed for most of a decade, and made him a hero to overweight people worldwide whose problems seemed minuscule compared to his.Sunday Cruz, 38, Hudson's fiancee, said his love for her made her feel blessed. "I loved the gentle giant," she said.
Hudson, 46, died Christmas Eve of heart failure. The medical examiner's office said he weighed 1,025 pounds.
His weight was estimated at 1,400 pounds soon after Sept. 14, 1987, when he came to the public's attention after rescue workers cut him out of the doorway where he had slipped and fallen in his Hempstead home.
He had been overweight since childhood, when at age 6 he weighed 125 pounds and was a compulsive eater. By age 7, he was scrounging bottles on the streets of Brooklyn to trade in for candy bars. He was 350 pounds by age 15.