Tragedy struck in Brazil when a charter flight of an Avro RJ85, operated by LaMia crashed near Medellín, Colombia, killing 71 of the 77 people on board. The aircraft was transporting the Brazilian Chapecoense football squad and their entourage from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, to Medellín, where the team was scheduled to play at the 2016 Copa Sudamericana Finals.
One of the four crew members, three of the players, and two other passengers survived with injuries. Rafael Henzel was one of six survivors of the 2016 air crash that claimed the lives of most of the Chapecoense squad and he has passed away after suffering a heart attack while playing football in Chapeco.
The plane carrying Chapecoense was flying from Santa Cruz de la Sierra, in Bolivia, where the team had spent a brief stopover. He was one of six survivors of the accident that claimed the lives of 71 passengers, many of them members of the Chapecoense team.
The 45-year-old collapsed whilst playing football with friends in Chapeco on Tuesday in his native Brazil, and died in hospital shortly after. The Chapecó club which Rafael supported and followed throughout his life paid a befitting tribute on its website.
“Throughout his brilliant career, Rafael told the story of Chapecoense, The green and white pages of this institution will always remember his example of overcoming [adversity] and everything he did.”
After the famous crash that shook the entire football world, Rafael spoke to the BBC and he said: “When we were 10-15 minutes away from landing, the engines went off because the plane had ran out of fuel… I put my seat belt on and I thought that the engines would go back in a few minutes. But that didn’t happen.”
The popular journalist Rafael Henzel had been set to cover the match between cup game between Chapecoense and Criciúma in the Copa do Brasil on Wednesday, but the club has asked Brazil’s football association to postpone the game out of respect for the journalist.
“My dream was to come back to my city, feel the ground under my feet. And this finally happened. It was a very special moment,” said the journalist, who published a book about the crash in 2017.
The other survivors of the crash are footballers Alan Ruschel, Helio Zemper Neto and Jakson Follmann, and crew members Ximena Suarez and Erwin Tumiri. The team lost a large number of the footballers in the 2016 crash and were only able to continue competing after a host of rival clubs in Brazil loaned a lot of players to their rivals.2