Award-winning young road builder and promising Napier Technical rugby player Hunter Donghi has died, just three months after finding out at the age of 20 that he had Stage 4 liver cancer.
Having completed his apprenticeship with roading contractor Fulton Hogan last year and been named Connexis Apprentice of the Year in Civil Construction in the Hawke's Bay East Coast region, he learnt of his condition just before Christmas.
He died at home in Tamatea, Napier, on Monday morning.
More than $70,000 was raised in just two days at the end of the first week of January as friends became aware of his plight. They supported his family with the otherwise unfunded medication it was hoped would save his life or at least prolong it and with treatment already under way the medication started immediately.
Public and business donations, a quiz night and auction at his rugby club and golf were parts of the fundraising effort which overwhelmed mum Kylee Martin and her family, including three other sons who were undergoing genetic scans. Hunter was thought to have had the same mutated cancer gene as father Paul, who died in January 2011, aged 35 and when Hunter was nine.