5-year-old Venezuelan twins and their caregiver, a 28-year-old man, died last Friday morning during a fire that occurred on the third floor of a building in the Nueva Esperanza neighborhood, Villa María del Triunfo district, in Lima, Peru.
Yosseth Leal, a friend of the Venezuelan family and caregiver of the little ones, went shopping in the morning and when he returned to the apartment he noticed that smoke was coming out of the windows. Although the young man tried to enter to save the twins, he was trapped by the flames.
The neighbors called the firefighters and the children’s father, Jesús Canchica, who confirmed that Leal was found inside the house with burned hands.
The twins, Mathias and Dilan, were found hugging each other in their bed and later taken to a local hospital where the deaths were confirmed.
“They were asleep,” said the children’s aunt Ysley Canchica in the middle Core News.
The autopsy revealed that the cause of death was suffocation, while authorities have not yet reported the cause of the fire.
The family, originally from San Cristóbal (Táchira state), has lived in Peru for four years. The children’s mother sells breakfast and her husband is a motorcycle taxi driver, so they left the children in Leal’s care in the mornings.
“Yosseth was our friend, but it’s like a family,” revealed Katherine Amaya Contreras to local media, who asks for help to repatriate her children to Venezuela and bury Leal in Lima.
