SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) – A woman crushed in her car in Boston’s Big Dig was buried in her hometown in Costa Rica on Wednesday, nine days after an accident that her husband told mourners, “will never be erased from my mind.”

Milena Mora de Del Valle’s oldest daughter, Yetty Raquel, 23, and her sons Caleb, 19, and 17-year-old Jeremy, sang and prayed in the Oasis of Hope Christian temple in Moravia, just north of the capital, San Jose.

As her coffin adorned with flowers was lowered into the ground in pouring rain, her youngest son broke down.

Del Valle, 39, left her children behind when she went to the United States to find a better life. A memorial book of photos released by her family at her funeral noted that she would have celebrated her 40th birthday on Sept. 12.

She was reunited with them a month before she was killed by 12 tons of ceiling panels as she and her husband drove through a Big Dig tunnel on their way to Boston’s Logan International Airport. Her death has unleashed a host of revelations of problems with the $14.6 billion project – the most expensive in U.S. history – which buried much of the city’s highway network in tunnels.

Her husband of four years, Angel Del Valle, survived the accident with minor injuries.

He told reporters after the funeral that he felt “very bad, sick for everything that has happened.”

“It will never be erased from my mind,” said Del Valle, a native of Puerto Rico.

The Big Dig Project was started in the 1990s and took over a decade to complete. It has since been plagued by leaks, falling debris, cost overruns, delays and problems linked to faulty construction.

Massachusetts authorities are considering criminal charges in the ceiling collapse. They have said documents have shown there was a dispute over whether the design could sustain the weight of the panels, and other documents showed problems with the bolts were known in 1999, the year the panels were installed.

The contractor on the tunnel, Modern Continental Construction Co., has issued a statement saying it was cooperating with the investigation and is “confident that our work fully complied with the plans and specifications provided by the Central Artery Tunnel Project.”

Two Big Dig tunnels have since been closed for inspections and repairs since Del Valle’s death.

In a book at the funeral, Del Valle wrote a final message to his wife: “The happiness that you gave me during these four years will always be in my heart and in my mind. I will never forget you because there will never be anyone like you.”

AP-ES-07-19-06 1824EDT