For more than three days, Argentine soccer player Lucas Trejo held on to the hope that rescuers would find his wife and two children alive beneath the ruins of their collapsed home.

That hope ended in heartbreaking tragedy.

Trejo’s wife, Yanina Maranella, and their two children, Aarón, 7, and Ainhoa, 5, were found dead after a 74-hour search through the rubble of the Cumanagotto residential complex in Playa Grande, La Guaira. The building collapsed during the powerful earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24.

Trejo, 38, was not at home when the disaster struck. He was in Caracas with his club, Club Sport Marítimo de La Guaira, preparing for a match when news of the earthquake reached him.

His family had been inside their apartment when the building collapsed.

After learning what had happened, Trejo rushed back toward La Guaira and joined the desperate rescue effort. For hours, he searched through the wreckage alongside volunteers and rescue workers, removing pieces of concrete and debris with his own hands.

The footballer also turned to social media in desperation, asking people to pray for his family and help spread information about his missing wife and children.

He was hoping for a miracle.

As the hours turned into days, rescue crews continued working through the collapsed structure. Trejo remained involved in the search despite the devastating circumstances, refusing to give up while there was still a possibility that his family could be alive.

But after approximately 74 hours, rescuers recovered the bodies of Yanina, Aarón and Ainhoa from the ruins.

Trejo’s club later confirmed the deaths and expressed condolences to the footballer and his family. The tragedy also sent shockwaves through the Venezuelan football community.

The earthquakes had struck Venezuela’s northern coast with reported magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, causing widespread destruction. The Playa Grande area, where Trejo’s family lived, was among the hardest-hit locations.

For Trejo, the disaster became something far more personal than a national catastrophe. He had returned to a destroyed building searching for the people closest to him, spending days among the rubble hoping that somehow they had survived.

A month later, Trejo reflected on those devastating hours, saying he had searched the collapsed building even while fearing his family might already be gone. He recalled gathering rescuers together on the third day to pray for a miracle.

The story has deeply affected people far beyond the world of soccer. Images of Trejo searching through the ruins captured the desperation of a husband and father refusing to abandon hope.

In the end, however, the search brought the news he had feared most.

Lucas Trejo went into the rubble looking for his family. After 74 hours, he found them — but not alive.

Yanina, Aarón and Ainhoa became part of the devastating human toll of Venezuela’s earthquake disaster, while Trejo was left to face an unimaginable loss that changed his life forever.