An out pouring of support as well wishers visit the home placing suffed animals at the death scene to express their emotions. A local radio station did live remote to raise money for the victums and local television stations helped to raise money.

In the Gosho (Buddhist Bible) Nichiren Daishonin (True Buddha born in Japan February 16, 1222) explains about death in the Gosho called "Sage and the Unenlighten Man" Nichiren Daishonin wrote this Gosho for people of today.  The Sage is Nichiren Daishonin and the Unelighten Man are people of today.    Please note that I am no expert on Buddhist Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist teaching  and I am speaking based only on my understanding of these great teachings.  My writings are not law but only a window into the great teachings of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism.  These teaching apply to the seven who died as well as Isaac Hayes or anyone reading the teachings who are interested in a prospective of Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism.  The Gosho reads:

How sad, how lamentable it is! From the beginningless past, we have been drunk on the wine of ignorance, reborn again and again in the six paths of existence and the four forms of birth. Sometimes we gasp amid the flames of the hell of burning heat or the hell of great burning heat; sometimes we are frozen in the ice of the hell of the crimson lotus or the hell of the great crimson lotus. Sometimes we must endure the hunger and thirst that torment those in the realm of hungry spirits, for five hundred lifetimes not so much as hearing the word “food” or “drink.” Sometimes we suffer being wounded and killed in the realm of animals, the wounding and killing that occur when the small are swallowed up by the large, or the short engulfed by the long. Sometimes we face the contention and strife of the realm of asuras; sometimes we are born as human beings and undergo the eight sufferings of birth, aging, sickness, death, the pain of parting from loved ones, the pain of encountering those whom we hate, the pain of failing to obtain what we desire, and the pain that arises from the five components of body and mind. And sometimes we are born in the realm of heaven and experience the five signs of decay.

Those who are Buddhist please get your Gosho and read the Gosho "Sage and Unenlighten man" This Gosho will give you a window into Nichiren Shoshu teachings.  Also I suggest that you get with your Priest dig into this great study materials. Those who are not Buddhist I will give a brief lecture of what I understand about Buddhism.

And so we go round and round like a cartwheel in this threefold world. Even among people once related as father and child, parents reborn do not know that they were parents, or children that they were children; and though husband and wife re-encounter each other, they do not know that they have already met. We go astray as though we had the eyes of sheep; we are as ignorant as though we had the eyes of wolves. We do not know our past relationship with the mother who gave us birth, and we are unaware of when we ourselves will succumb to death. And yet we have obtained birth in the human world, something difficult to achieve, and have encountered the sacred teachings of the Thus Come One, which are rarely to be met. We are like the one-eyed turtle finding a floating log with a hole in it that fits him exactly. How regrettable it would be, then, if we did not take this opportunity to sever the bonds of birth and death, making no attempt to free ourselves from the cage of the threefold world!