CARACAS – When Lucas Trejo posted to Instagram from a training camp in Caracas on the night of June 24, he was asking strangers for help. “Our building in Playa Grande collapsed,” he wrote. “I don’t know anything about my family. Please pray for them and share this message in case someone saw them. I want to believe they weren’t there.”
They were there. Seventy-four hours later, rescue crews recovered the bodies of his wife, Yanina Maranella, and his two children, Aaron, 5, and Ainhoa, 7, from the rubble of their apartment building in La Guaira.
Trejo, a 38-year-old Argentine defender who plays for Sport Marítimo de La Guaira in Venezuela’s second division, had been preparing for a league match in Caracas when two earthquakes struck northern Venezuela 39 seconds apart on the evening of June 24 — a 7.2-magnitude foreshock followed immediately by a 7.5-magnitude mainshock, the strongest seismic event the country had recorded since 1900. The tremors collapsed buildings across La Guaira, the coastal state north of Caracas, and set off a disaster that has now killed more than 1,430 people and left more than 68,000 missing.
Trejo returned to La Guaira immediately. His brother-in-law, Ricardo Ardiles, told CNN Español that Trejo arrived to a horrific scene and that absolutely nothing remained of the beachfront home where Yanina and the children had been.
What followed was 74 hours of search. More than 2,000 workers from 27 countries deployed across the affected areas, and 137 search dogs were mobilized. Four hundred and thirty aftershocks, including a magnitude 4.7 tremor on June 26 that collapsed a bridge connecting Caraballeda to the rest of La Guaira, repeatedly disrupted the operation. The airport serving Caracas sustained significant damage. The infrastructure on which rescue workers depended was itself a casualty.
The club’s statement, released after the bodies were found, was brief. “We join the grief that overwhelms player Lucas Trejo for the passing of his wife, Yanina Maranella, and of his children, Aaron and Ainhoa Trejo,” Sport Marítimo de La Guaira said. “Lucas, you are not alone. Your Marítimo La Guaira family is with you.” Fellow Argentine footballer Edson Tortolero, a close friend, wrote that his heart breaks “into a thousand pieces” and asked God to give Trejo strength to endure what he described as an unimaginable loss. Trejo himself has made no public statement since the recovery.
The tragedy landed in the same week that the 2026 FIFA World Cup reached its knockout stage in North America. FIFA ordered a moment of silence before the opening round-of-32 matches in recognition of the earthquake victims, a gesture that briefly interrupted a tournament watched by hundreds of millions and placed the disaster in front of an audience far beyond Venezuela. For Trejo, who built his career across two decades and eight countries including Spain, Greece, the United States, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru before settling in Venezuela, the week unfolded in a country that had become his family’s home more than it remained simply a posting.
The broader disaster in La Guaira and across Venezuela continues. In La Guaira state alone, more than 1,200 people remain listed as missing. More than 1,400 buildings were destroyed. Crews are still pulling survivors from rubble: a 60-year-old woman found alive after 86 hours trapped, an 11-year-old boy rescued by a Colombian team in La Guaira after six hours of concentrated work. Each of those recoveries represents the outcome Trejo spent three days hoping for and did not receive.
He is 38 years old. He has played professional football across two continents for more than two decades. He was three hours from home when the ground moved. CBS News reported that rescue workers found his family in the ruins of the building where they had been living while he trained. He has said nothing since. There is nothing that would explain what those 74 hours were.
