A seminary student from Duluth who died in last week's Haiti earthquake "spent his last breath singing," in the words of his widow.

Renee Larson was in a children's home in Port-au-Prince with husband, Ben, 25, and his cousin, Jonathan, when the quake hit Tuesday.

In an interview with the news service of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Renee Larson described what happened:

"We were all together on the same floor. We all kind of panicked and started running. Jonathan and I were together. [Ben] was hugging a pillar in the middle of the floor. I turned and I saw him, and I saw concrete starting to fall on him. I called for him and started running toward him."

Although two floors of the building above them had collapsed, Renee Larson and Jonathan Larson managed to escape onto the building's roof. Ben Larson didn't.

They called to him and heard him reply.

"I told him I loved him, and that Jon and I were okay, and to keep singing," Renee Larson said. "But the singing stopped after he sang the words 'God's peace to us we pray,' " she said. "If he was alive, he would have been calling for help desperately. Ben spent his last breath singing."

Larson, the son of two Lutheran pastors in Duluth, was with his wife and cousin on a mission trip during which he was teaching Haitian lay leaders, according to Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, where he was a senior working toward his master's of divinity degree. Renee Larson and Jonathan Larson returned to the United States last Friday.

The denomination is continuing efforts in Haiti to recover Larson's body. According to the news service, his family has asked that memorials be given to Wartburg Seminary, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Haiti, the St. Joseph Home for Boys in Haiti or the denomination's international disaster response division.