Argentine soccer star Lucas Trejo loses family in Venezuela quake

Lucas Trejo spent about three days searching the ruins of his family’s apartment building in Playa Grande, La Guaira, before the bodies of his wife, Yanina Maranella, and their children, Aarón and Ainhoa, were found. The Argentine forward’s club, Club Sport Marítimo La Guaira, said it deeply regretted the irreparable loss as Venezuela struggled with the deadliest earthquake disaster in more than a century.

The family was inside the building when twin earthquakes struck on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, collapsing the structure in the coastal community west of Caracas. The temblors, measured at magnitudes 7.2 and 7.5 and separated by less than a minute, hit while Trejo, 38, was in Caracas with his team. The collapse turned an ordinary home into a fatal trap in a region already strained by fragile infrastructure.

By Sunday, June 29, the death toll had climbed to nearly 1,500, with tens of thousands still missing as rescue crews worked through damaged neighborhoods in La Guaira and other parts of the country. Officials and aid groups said the scale of the destruction was likely to widen as teams reached more collapsed buildings and cut-off communities, especially in northwestern Venezuela.

The United Nations said 44 international urban search-and-rescue teams had deployed 2,245 specialists and 140 search dogs at the request of the Venezuelan government. The agency also estimated preliminary direct physical damage at $6.7 billion, while aid organizations said nearly 7 million people could be affected by the quakes and their aftermath. Hospitals were among the infrastructure hit, raising concern that the toll would extend well beyond the initial casualty count.

For Trejo, the loss was personal and immediate. For Venezuela, it was a reminder of how quickly a dense apartment block in a working-class coastal area can become unrecoverable when strong quakes strike back to back. The search in Playa Grande became part of a national catastrophe measured not only in deaths and missing people, but in shattered homes, overwhelmed hospitals and a rescue effort still spread across the country.