Latest news with #Puerta
The Irish Sun
11-08-2025
- Sport
- The Irish Sun
Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca opens up on heartbreak of losing team-mate at 22 in death that shocked footballing world
Maresca revealed the one item he'd love to share with tragic pal ENZO'S PAIN Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca opens up on heartbreak of losing team-mate at 22 in death that shocked footballing world CHELSEA boss Enzo Maresca loves to celebrate with a cigar - but more than anything he wishes he could have a smoke with a team-mate who died in horrific circumstances. Maresca has enjoyed plenty of recent success, guiding the Blues to glory in the Conference League and Club World Cup. Advertisement 5 Enzo Maresca has opened up on the heartbreaking loss of Antonio Puerta Credit: Getty 5 The pair played together at Sevilla and Maresca would love to share a cigar with his pal Credit: EPA After the latter, the Blues boss enjoyed one of his favourite Portagas 2 cigars, the brand he used to smoke with Manchester City head coach Pep Guardiola when they were marking City's success. But when Maresca was asked to name the football personality he would most like to one of his favourite Portagas No 2 cigars with, the Italian gave a poignant answer - Antonio Puerta, who died aged 22 after suffering a cardiac arrest on the field. Maresca told Men in Blazers: 'That's a very good question. I will tell you, when I was 25, 26, I lost a team-mate inside the pitch. So if I could, I would like a cigar with him.' Midfielder Maresca had four seasons at Sevilla but his third campaign started in tragic fashion. Advertisement The Italian was on the field when, just 35 minutes into the opening game of the 2007/8 season - at home against Getafe - Puerta suffered a cardiac arrest. After the wing-back collapsed and lost consciousness in the penalty area, team-mates and medical staff rushed to his aid. Puerta recovered enough to walk to the dressing room but collapsed again there. He was resuscitated and rushed to hospital, where he had to receive more life-saving resuscitation. Advertisement But Puerta died three days later, on August 28, because of multiple organ failure and irreversible brain damage. It emerged that he had an incurable hereditary heart disease called arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. Fans spot Liam Delap's reaction on bench after Joao Pedro goal as Chelsea fans say 'this guy can't catch a break' 5 Maresca and Puerta shared a close bond at Sevilla Credit: AFP 5 Puerta died after collapsing on the pitch from a cardiac arrest Credit: AFP Advertisement 5 They won the UEFA Cup together in 2006 Credit: Getty Puerta's death shocked Spanish football and the wider world. His girlfriend was expecting their first child at the time of his death. When Puerta passed away, Maresca and the rest of the Seville squad were already in Greece for a Champions League qualifier against AEK Athens. Advertisement Maresca, who played for Greek side Olympiakos later in his career, spoke about the tragedy when Chelsea went to Athens in October 2024 for a Conference League game against Panathinaikos. Maresca said: 'In terms of the season I spent here in Greece, for me it was very good with Olympiakos, a big rival with Panathinaikos. But unfortunately I lost a friend on the pitch when I was at Seville. 'The first game we played after that, we were already in Athens and just on that day, one of our team-mates passed away in Antonio Puerta. 'So it is a mixed feeling. The season in Athens was fantastic. But every time I come back here I am a little bit sad.' Advertisement The Champions League game against AEK, which had been scheduled for the evening of the day Puerta died, was postponed. When Sevilla faced AC Milan in the Uefa Super Cup on August 31, all 22 players had the name Puerta on the back of their shirts. Sergio Ramos, who had come through the Sevilla academy and into the first team with Puerta, wore T-shirts in memory of Puerta after Spain's triumphs at Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup. Jesus Navas, who was on the field on the day Puerta collapse, made the same gesture after the 2010 World Cup final. Advertisement In 2010, Sevilla unveiled a statue of Puerta at their training ground. Watch the full Men in Blazers interview with Enzo Maresca here.
Scottish Sun
11-08-2025
- Sport
- Scottish Sun
Chelsea boss Enzo Maresca opens up on heartbreak of losing team-mate at 22 in death that shocked footballing world
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) CHELSEA boss Enzo Maresca loves to celebrate with a cigar - but more than anything he wishes he could have a smoke with a team-mate who died in horrific circumstances. Maresca has enjoyed plenty of recent success, guiding the Blues to glory in the Conference League and Club World Cup. 5 Enzo Maresca has opened up on the heartbreaking loss of Antonio Puerta Credit: Getty 5 The pair played together at Sevilla and Maresca would love to share a cigar with his pal Credit: EPA 5 Puerta died after collapsing on the pitch from a cardiac arrest Credit: AFP After the latter, the Blues boss enjoyed one of his favourite Portagas 2 cigars, the brand he used to smoke with Manchester City head coach Pep Guardiola when they were marking City's success. But when Maresca was asked to name the football personality he would most like to one of his favourite Portagas No 2 cigars with, the Italian gave a poignant answer - Antonio Puerta, who died aged 22 after suffering a cardiac arrest on the field. Maresca told Men in Blazers: 'That's a very good question. I will tell you, when I was 25, 26, I lost a team-mate inside the pitch. So if I could, I would like a cigar with him.' Midfielder Maresca had four seasons at Sevilla but his third campaign started in tragic fashion. The Italian was on the field when, just 35 minutes into the opening game of the 2007/8 season - at home against Getafe - Puerta suffered a cardiac arrest. After the wing-back collapsed and lost consciousness in the penalty area, team-mates and medical staff rushed to his aid. Puerta recovered enough to walk to the dressing room but collapsed again there. He was resuscitated and rushed to hospital, where he had to receive more life-saving resuscitation. But Puerta died three days later, on August 28, because of multiple organ failure and irreversible brain damage. It emerged that he had an incurable hereditary heart disease called arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy. Fans spot Liam Delap's reaction on bench after Joao Pedro goal as Chelsea fans say 'this guy can't catch a break' 5 Maresca and Puerta shared a close bond at Sevilla Credit: AFP 5 They won the UEFA Cup together in 2006 Credit: Getty Puerta's death shocked Spanish football and the wider world. His girlfriend was expecting their first child at the time of his death. When Puerta passed away, Maresca and the rest of the Seville squad were already in Greece for a Champions League qualifier against AEK Athens. Maresca, who played for Greek side Olympiakos later in his career, spoke about the tragedy when Chelsea went to Athens in October 2024 for a Conference League game against Panathinaikos. Maresca said: 'In terms of the season I spent here in Greece, for me it was very good with Olympiakos, a big rival with Panathinaikos. But unfortunately I lost a friend on the pitch when I was at Seville. 'The first game we played after that, we were already in Athens and just on that day, one of our team-mates passed away in Antonio Puerta. 'So it is a mixed feeling. The season in Athens was fantastic. But every time I come back here I am a little bit sad.' The Champions League game against AEK, which had been scheduled for the evening of the day Puerta died, was postponed. When Sevilla faced AC Milan in the Uefa Super Cup on August 31, all 22 players had the name Puerta on the back of their shirts. Sergio Ramos, who had come through the Sevilla academy and into the first team with Puerta, wore T-shirts in memory of Puerta after Spain's triumphs at Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup. Jesus Navas, who was on the field on the day Puerta collapse, made the same gesture after the 2010 World Cup final. In 2010, Sevilla unveiled a statue of Puerta at their training ground. Watch the full Men in Blazers interview with Enzo Maresca here.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Bayer Leverkusen's Gustavo Puerta joins Hull City
Official | Bayer Leverkusen's Gustavo Puerta joins Hull City Colombian midfielder Gustavo Puerta of Bayer Leverkusen has transferred permanently to Hull City. This was confirmed by both the 21-year-old's Bundesliga parent club and his EFL Championship side on Saturday evening. Puerta was shipped out to Hull on loan at the beginning of this season. Advertisement Leverkusen purchased Puerta for a reported €2m from Colombia's FC Bogota in the January 2023 transfer window. The Colombia U20 international was immediately loaned out to 2. Bundesliga side FC Nürnberg, yet was unable to gain any playing time. During 2023/24 campaign, Puerta made seven Bundesliga and three Europa League appearances for Xabi Alonso's Werkself. The loan deal arranged this autumn was known to contain an automatic purchase clause and a resale guarantee for the German club. Puerta has made 27 league appearances (20 starts) for the Tigers this season, in the process raising his estimated market worth from €500,000 to €3.5m. Kicker reports that Leverkusen receive a €4m base-transfer fee on the transaction. The potential resale percentage is not yet known. GGFN | Peter Weis
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Yahoo
Sentencing delayed for man who smuggled 720,000 fentanyl pills
SAN DIEGO (FOX 5/KUSI) — The sentencing of a man who pleaded guilty to smuggling more than 700,000 fentanyl pills into San Diego County was delayed Tuesday due to an unresolved issue involving firearms registered in his name. Jose Hector Ruiz was arrested in February 2024 in Alpine after authorities found 720,000 fentanyl pills inside his vehicle. He later pleaded guilty and was scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday afternoon. However, the hearing was postponed after his defense attorney requested a continuance, citing that two firearms registered to Ruiz had not yet been turned over to law enforcement. Ruiz is now scheduled to appear in court again on June 2. He faces more than 20 years in prison. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that the arrest of Ruiz 'saved countless lives.' The arrest was part of the state's ongoing fentanyl enforcement program, which coordinates efforts between local, state and federal authorities. Among those closely watching the case is Jaime Puerta, a father who lost his 16-year-old son, Daniel, to fentanyl poisoning in April 2020. Daniel died after ingesting a counterfeit oxycodone pill he purchased through Snapchat, which was later found to contain fentanyl. 'What it turned out to be, I later learned, was a fake pill — a counterfeit pill made of filler, binder and illicit fentanyl, and it took his life,' Puerta said. Puerta is the co-founder and president of an advocacy group that raises awareness about fentanyl and its dangers. The synthetic opioid is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and is often used in counterfeit pills sold by drug dealers. In pushing for tougher sentencing for fentanyl-related crimes, Puerta is advocating for the passage of the bipartisan 'HALT Fentanyl Act,' which would mandate a minimum 10-year prison sentence for certain fentanyl offenses. 'We really need our Congress to step up to the plate,' he said. 'That way, all these drug dealers who are trying to find ways around our judicial system have no way of escaping it.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Parents are blaming Snapchat for their teens' fentanyl deaths. Will an L.A. lawsuit shape the future of social media?
Jaime Puerta keeps a shrine to his son, Daniel, behind his desk — a collection of candles, old pictures and his son's beloved toy car. He also keeps a stash of naloxone, the lifesaving opioid overdose reversal drug, and a yellow poster Puerta carried while marching with other grieving parents outside the headquarters of Snap, creator of the disappearing messaging app Snapchat. At the bottom of the poster is the solemn slogan of his son's life: "Forever 16." Puerta is among the more than 60 families who are suing Snap, arguing the Santa Monica-based company is responsible for drug sales to teens that are facilitated through its app. Snap denies the allegations in the wrongful death cases, which accuse the company of designing an app that is inherently dangerous. In a statement, the company said it removed more than 2.4 million pieces of drug-related content last year, disabling 516,000 related accounts, and noted that it blocks searches for drug-related terms and instead redirects users to resources about their dangers. The cases, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, could have broader implications for social media companies and could weaken a key legal defense long used by Big Tech companies to shield themselves from liability. "We're in the middle of a reckoning for Snap and other social media platforms," said Tom Galvin, executive director of Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit focused on internet safety. Daniel Puerta-Johnson died at Children's Hospital Los Angeles on April 6, 2020, a few days after his father found him unconscious in bed. Half of a blue tablet lay on his son's dresser, Puerta said. It looked like oxycodone, but was actually fentanyl, a far more potent painkiller that can suppress a person's breathing, according to the lawsuit. The investigation into Daniel's death, the lawsuit said, determined that he met a drug dealer through Snapchat a few days before he died. 'What the hell is going on here?' Puerta remembered thinking. A former Marine, Puerta now zigzags the nation sharing his son's story. Last month, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging lawmakers to take action to stop what he characterized as low-level drug dealers selling with impunity on Snapchat and other social media apps. Attorneys for Puerta and the other families have argued that Snapchat's design features — specifically its signature disappearing messages, a tool that can be used to connect with strangers on the app, and what plaintiffs call ineffective methods of verifying users' ages and identities — make it easy for drug dealers to connect with teens and avoid detection. 'Snapchat," the lawsuit reads, "has evolved into a digital open-air drug market." Snap's lawyers have argued the company is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — a 1996 law that insulates platforms from liability for user content — and asked to have the case tossed out. But Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ruled last year that the matter could proceed on several counts, including the argument that the app's design was itself destructive. Both sides have argued that the law is clear on the matter, but the judge disagreed. 'What is clear and obvious,' Riff wrote, 'is that the law is unsettled and in a state of development.' In December, justices on California's 2nd District Court of Appeals denied a petition from Snap to overturn Riff's ruling, paving the way for the proceedings in L.A. to resume. During a status conference in the case last month, Riff told the attorneys for Snap and the plaintiffs that he wanted the cases to move expeditiously. Before the hearing, Puerta and several other parents gathered on the steps of the courthouse. One mother carried a framed portrait of her daughter, another clutched a flag with her son's picture and a familiar refrain: "Forever 13." Social media platforms have, over the last decade, faced growing public pleas to address evidence that their algorithms may be harmful, especially to teens, said Galvin of the internet safety nonprofit. But the platforms, including Snapchat, whose financial models rely on maximizing the number of users and how long users spend on the apps, haven't done enough, he said. "Next it was, 'Look, if you don't do it, someone will probably make you,' " he said. Facebook, Instagram, Discord and YouTube all face legal accusations that they have caused harm to children, and last fall, a Florida mother sued alleging its chatbot technology was responsible after her 14-year-old son took his own life. Lawyers for the company, which asked to have the lawsuit dismissed on free speech grounds, said in court papers that the chatbot had discouraged the boy from hurting himself. The platforms have also increasingly come under scrutiny from prosecutors and politicians. Read more: Local school districts are suing social media companies, saying they've hurt kids' mental health. Will the suits succeed? California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and his counterparts from other states filed lawsuits against TikTok last fall, arguing that the app's features, such as beauty filters and infinite scrolling, were harming young people's mental health. A few weeks earlier, New Mexico's attorney general sued Snap, arguing that it was designed to addict young people and that its algorithm facilitated the sexual exploitation of children. Snap responded, saying it had worked diligently to find and remove bad actors and would keep doing so as online threats evolved. Several states, including California, passed laws last year restricting children's access to social media or requiring parental consent. Some of those laws are being challenged on 1st Amendment grounds. And before he finished his second term as U.S. surgeon general earlier this year, Dr. Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require social media companies to include warning labels on their platforms similar to those mandatory on cigarette packaging. The platforms, he said, should be required to publicly share data on health effects. 'While the platforms claim they are making their products safer, Americans need more than words,' Murthy wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. 'We need proof." Sixty-four families have signed on to the fentanyl wrongful death suits against Snap in L.A. by the Social Media Victims Law Center, the Seattle-based legal firm representing Puerta. 'Every day we hear from new parents who have lost kids,' said Matthew Bergman, the firm's founding attorney. "It's just unbelievable." In addition to Puerta's son, the lawsuits tell the stories of a Palmdale teen who died a few days after his 17th birthday, cutting short his dream of becoming a bull rider; a pharmacist's daughter with aspirations of becoming a forensic psychologist; and a Santa Monica boy whose parents are advocating for Sammy's Law, federal legislation in his name that would require platforms to allow parents to track children's online activity using third-party software. Read more: California lawmakers want to make social media safer for young people. Can they finally succeed? Snap's chief executive, Evan Spiegel, addressed the tragedies directly under tense questioning by members of Congress last year. 'There are a number of parents whose children have been able to access illegal drugs on your platform," said Laphonza Butler, then one of California's senators. "What do you say to those parents?' Spiegel looked down and shifted in his seat. 'Senator, we are devastated that we cannot …' he said. Butler cut him off. 'To the parents," she said. "What do you say to those parents?" "I'm so sorry that we have not been able to prevent these tragedies,' he said. 'We work very hard to block all search terms related to drugs from our platform.' David Décary-Hétu, a University of Montreal criminology professor, said the situation of dealers peddling drugs on social platforms had "slowly gotten better." Last fall, he and other researchers scoured online for people selling drugs on several platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram and X. While they did find some, he said, the sellers used cryptic language — just the letter "C" or a snowflake emoji, for instance, instead of referencing "cocaine" — to get around algorithms the companies use to root out dealers. But even when dealers' accounts are removed, they can create new ones easily using a different email address or phone number, said Eric Feinberg, vice president of the Coalition for a Safer Web, an internet safety nonprofit that has researched drug sales on social media. 'That's the whole problem with this stuff, it's whack-a-mole,' he said. For his part, Puerta said he would like to see Snapchat — whose 13-and-older age requirement can be quickly skirted by entering a fake birthday — take more sweeping steps, such as requiring users to upload a copy of their ID. As a boy, Daniel had a deeply inquisitive spirit. But around the time he went through puberty — and got his first cellphone — Puerta noticed a stark change in his son's demeanor. Always a great student who dreamed of becoming a software engineer, his grades dropped to Ds and Fs, and during a father-son trip to Maui a decade ago Daniel almost never looked up from his screen. 'He was completely immersed in that phone.' After a growth spurt early in high school, he told his dad he felt uncomfortable in his body and so anxious that it felt like a race car was tearing through his mind. He began self-medicating with pot and then Xanax. But after a stint at a wilderness camp in 2018, Puerta said he felt like he finally had his son back. Then came the isolation of the early pandemic shutdowns. On the first day of April in 2020, Puerta found his son barely breathing. He was taken off life support a few days later. "It haunts me," said Puerta, who blames himself for not researching the apps on his son's phone more closely, for not asking more questions. For two years, he left Daniel's room untouched, but the image of the empty bed tormented him, so Puerta replaced it with two recliners. He added a bookshelf, filling it with items, such as Daniel's boyhood rock collection and a lei from their trip to Maui. Daniel's ashes sit in a wooden box, tucked in front of the remains of his beloved dog Birdie. 'I commune with my son here,' he said. 'It's my go-to place. No one can take that away from me.' Puerta keeps in touch with his son's closest friends, including Sammi Ratkay. The two met in first grade at Plum Canyon Elementary, but got close during their freshman year of high school. Neither had a first-period class, so they often hung out in Ratkay's sister's car blasting music on their phones. Like most everyone in their school at the time, Ratkay, now 22, says, Daniel spent a lot of time on Snapchat. They messaged each other on the app daily. He sent clips of himself dancing and shared old photos, including one of himself with a bad haircut as a boy. It was from a group message on the platform, she said, that she learned Daniel was in the hospital. 'Social media was our lives," she said. "I hate to say it, but it was everything." Sign up for our Wide Shot newsletter to get the latest entertainment business news, analysis and insights. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
