Former New York Mets pitcher Jenrry Mejia says “it was God” who saved him from death after he narrowly escaped a catastrophic building collapse during the recent earthquakes in Venezuela.
According to The New York Post, the 36-year-old—who currently plays for the La Guaira Delfines of the Venezuelan Major League—was returning to his sixth-floor room at the Hotel Eduards in La Guaira following a gym session.
Mejia’s career has been at a crossroads since becoming the first player in MLB history to receive a lifetime ban for testing positive three times for performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) in 2016. After being suspended, he was reinstated in 2018 by Commissioner Rob Manfred, but hasn’t been the same since. Being caught in the devastating earthquake is just the latest in a turbulent career. On June 24, his team was scheduled to play that fateful evening.
At the time of the earthquake, he had to rely on the athletic conditioning he had depended on throughout his career. It helped him save an elderly man who was nearby.
“With the agility I have, I helped an elderly gentleman,” Mejia later told Mañana Deportiva. “I was able to drag him away, take him with me.”
At approximately 6:00 p.m. on June 24, a magnitude-7.2 earthquake struck near San Felipe, followed just 39 seconds later by a devastating 7.5-magnitude aftershock in nearby Yumare. The back-to-back disasters have left over 589 people dead and nearly 3,000 others injured.
Mejia’s survival came down to a fortunate elevator glitch. In an interview with Mañana Deportiva (via Diario Libre), Mejia explained that he had pressed the button for the sixth floor, but the elevator bypassed his request and headed down to the ground floor instead after being summoned by another guest. That detour ultimately saved his life, placing him at the exit just seconds before the hotel crumbled.
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“I was in the gym area. And at that moment, I took the elevator to leave,” Mejia said. “In fact, I had pressed number 6, which was where my floor was. But… I think it was God because instead of going up, it went down to the basement.”
That brought the elevator to the bottom floor and out of the hotel, where, 40 seconds later, the building collapsed.
Mejia, who played for the Mets from 2010 to 2015, said he believes that he and an elderly man he helped rescue were the only survivors.
“With the agility I have, I helped an elderly gentleman. I was able to drag him away, take him with me,” he recalled. “I think only he and I (came out alive), the others are still there, trapped under the rubble.”
He also said that he couldn’t fly back home to the Dominican Republic as all flights had been suspended due to the earthquakes. He revealed that he had lost all his possessions, including his passport.
