It was just a few seconds. First the alert on her phone, then the tremor. In the blink of an eye, everything went black and Ashley Ochoa, 32, was buried under a mountain of rubble. She had landed in Caracas just five hours earlier. In the video taken by her rescuer, she wears a dust-stained green dress, the same one she had chosen minutes before the earthquake to wear on her first in-person date with her boyfriend, Victor José Ruvolo Mujico, who had traveled to the capital from his town in Quíbor, Lara State, to pick her up. They had been talking long-distance for several months, after meeting in the underworld of TikTok rap battles. They decided to stay in La Guaira, the place that collapsed due to the consecutive 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes that brought tragedy to Venezuela. She heard him scream for help before silence fell over the disaster of the collapse. “It seems like a joke from the universe, how is it possible that five hours after meeting him, the earthquake happens and I’ll never see him again?” Ochoa wonders, still in the hospital recovering from her injuries.
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She hadn’t even told her parents she was in Venezuela. Born in San Diego, California, to Mexican migrants, she had told her family she was visiting Mexico, as she usually does every year. She feared they wouldn’t understand her internet-born relationship. “A friend asked me to download the tracking app on my phone and was able to locate me and notify them,” she recounts in a phone call. By then, her missing person’s report had already gone viral and several of her friends were looking for her. As the hours passed, she remained buried under the ruins of her Airbnb. “Those were very difficult hours. My rescuer told me he pulled me out at three in the morning, but I wasn’t processing time well. I didn’t process that it was nine hours; for me, it felt like three. I don’t know if I lost consciousness,” she recalls.
She planned the trip to Venezuela at the last minute. After several months of video calls with one of her favorite TikTok rappers, and a few days after he officially asked her to be his girlfriend during a live stream on the platform, she mustered the courage to finally meet him. “I had gotten very involved in lives. I was a donor on the platform, and Victor was a rapper who did rap battles. I always rooted against him, supporting Colombians and Venezuelans because of the algorithm, which led me to them, but little by little he won me over,” she recounts about how they met. In the end, she became his biggest supporter within the community, and he became hers when she decided to start doing lives too. Five months later, on June 15, he asked her to be his partner in front of all the live stream users. “He asked me with rings and flowers. For me, it was necessary to meet him in person to develop something deeper,” she notes.
Upon landing, she was so nervous that she hid in the airport arrivals lounge. “I didn’t know, it’s one thing to talk every day on a video call and another in person. I was afraid he wouldn’t like me, or that I wouldn’t like his smell. I’m very particular about those things,” she recalls with a smile. She finally decided to come out. He was waiting for her with two friends. He held a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear. “When I hugged him, everything passed. I told him it had been worth the trip. We had our first kiss there,” she adds. That video of the encounter was the only one that would survive after the catastrophe.
They went straight to the Airbnb, an 11-story building very close to the beach and La Guaira, the main center of the earthquake disaster where dozens of buildings collapsed and which would later be the scene of the search for hundreds of bodies. “We locked ourselves in the room. Our friends left us alone to rest and enjoy. Those were very beautiful moments we shared; we talked about going out to eat, but we didn’t want it to end,” Ochoa details. In those hours, they talked about the trips they wanted to take together in the future. “I remember touching his face, his beard. I liked how it felt. We didn’t want to separate, but we had friends waiting for us to eat,” she recounts. Victor Ruvolo went to the bathroom, and she took the opportunity to change clothes. “I was pulling up my dress when I saw an alert on my phone that an earthquake was coming. I called Victor to warn him, but he had left his phone in the bedroom. It started shaking horribly, it was too heavy,” she recalls.
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From the darkness, she heard her boyfriend’s voice, but as the hours passed, his screams faded, and she stopped hearing him. When a civilian managed to pull her out from under the rubble, with a lost gaze and covered in dust, the rescuer continued searching the building. “It was a very difficult rescue; it took quite a while. When they finished with me, they tried to get Nairo, our friend, out. But then they couldn’t rescue Victor; he wasn’t speaking anymore. We weren’t close; I don’t know how the building broke apart, but he wasn’t near me,” she admits. When Ochoa was transferred to the hospital, she had several fractures in her left foot and open wounds. She lay on the ground for several hours, surrounded by other injured people. “I saw people arriving, dying. I told a woman that I didn’t know about my boyfriend, that I was worried about him. She prayed for me, and a few hours later, her husband, who was next to me, passed away,” she manages to recall from that day.
She had lost her phone, her cards, everything. Someone at the hospital took a video of her asking for help to locate Noa Gusamin, a friend who lives in Caracas. They managed to operate on her foot with little anesthesia and without an operating room, among all the injured. The wound became infected, and three weeks later, she is still fighting bacteria and under medical supervision. Thanks to her internet followers, her friend managed to find her. “All my TikTok friends coordinated to send money to Noa so he could get around, because transportation in the city was very expensive. Many people from the community sent help and kept an eye on things,” she says gratefully.
By the time Victor Ruvolo’s body was recovered and the funeral held, she was still in the hospital. Her own TikTok rap community raised funds to transport the coffin back to his town. The few photos and videos Ochoa and Ruvolo managed to take that day were lost along with both their phones in the rubble. “It’s hard to process that moments before we were so happy, and then this happens. I’ll never hear him or see him again; it’s hard to understand why things happen,” Ochoa says through tears. “If I hadn’t gone, he wouldn’t have traveled, and this wouldn’t have happened, but it’s no one’s fault. Many people have died. One can die in a car accident; you never know when the moment will come,” she adds.
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