Lucas Trejo was training in Caracas when two earthquakes struck northern Venezuela and killed his wife, Yanina, and their children, Aarón and Ainhoa, at home in La Guaira. The Argentine soccer player rushed back and spent days searching through rubble after the disaster.
Club Sport Marítimo de La Guaira announced the deaths on Sunday in an Instagram post, saying they occurred on June 24th during the quake that shook the entire country. Trejo has played for several first and second division clubs in Venezuela since 2023 and signed with Club Sport Marítimo de La Guaira earlier this year, but the club’s statement turned a player’s routine into a family tragedy.
The loss is also part of a far larger toll. Venezuelan government officials said more than 1,700 people died in the quakes, and Trejo was not the only figure in local football to be hit. Former Club Sport Marítimo de La Guaira player Héctor Bello lost his wife, Andrea, and the Venezuelan Football Federation later announced the death of 18-year-old Yimvert Berroterán, a rising player who had represented the country’s youth teams from 2024 to 2026.
Trejo’s brother-in-law, Ricardo Ardiles, said he was emotionally overwhelmed after reaching the family home. Ardiles said what Trejo found was a horrific scene and that there was nothing left of the building itself, a detail that points to the wider fear around collapse-prone structures in Venezuela, especially tall concrete buildings on soft soils that can amplify shaking.
For Trejo, the immediate answer now is still painful and unfinished: his family is gone, the damage in La Guaira remains only partly described, and the man who left for training in Caracas came back to search for the people he loved in the wreckage. The club’s post made the loss public, but it did not close the story of what was left behind.
