The siblings Jeremías and Ana Martina Conte Grand were traveling together on one of the trains involved in the crash that occurred in Urda, in the province of Toledo, Spain. After the accident, the San Juan native young woman would have died as a result of the severe consequences of the impact, although she remains on the official registers of missing persons because her body had not been found.
Her brother, by contrast, managed to survive, despite suffering serious injuries, and was able to recount the dramatic moments they endured in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Jeremías, 36, lives in Torrejón, in the Madrid province, with his wife and their young daughter. Ana Martina, who lived in San Juan, had traveled to Spain with her parents to meet her niece. It had been two years since the siblings had seen each other, and they were together when the tragedy occurred.
In dialogue with Corriere della Sera, Jeremías described how it all began. First he felt the carriage tilt sideways and push him out of his seat. Then he was dragged into the aisle, where he received the first impact.
“There is where I felt the first impact, which made me jump. I thought: ‘It’s over’,” he recalled. Soon after, according to his account, the train fell onto the passengers and began to spin. “I felt it turning, I felt the train strike me, it was as if I were being run over. First, it seemed to drag me further down, then higher up”, he said.
“I saw my sister and she was already dead”: the most painful moment
Among the memories of the accident, Jeremías identified one that marked him especially: when he managed to turn around and saw Ana Martina. “Her feet were crushed. I turned around. I saw my sister, and she was already dead,” he recounted.
The man stated that, when the emergency crews arrived, he asked that the young woman be checked because he had noticed she was not breathing. “I immediately said: ‘Check her, I can see she’s not breathing’,” he said.
Afterward, the pain from his own injuries and the state of shock made it impossible for him to remember how he was removed from the wreckage. “I was in a lot of pain. They were carrying people and couldn’t lift me. They sedated me right away. In those moments, you’re in a state of shock, trying to assimilate what happened,” he explained.
Jeremías suffered a fracture of two ribs on the right side and the shoulder blade, damage to a cervical vertebra, and a deep cut on his left leg that required numerous stitches. He remains hospitalized at the University Hospital of Toledo, where he is recovering from the injuries.
The anguish of the Conte Grand family
During the interview with the Italian media, Claudia Viberti, the mother of Jeremías and Ana Martina, who had been accompanying her son at the hospital, also spoke. Her testimony reflected the anguish of having survived a family tragedy and not yet being able to recover her daughter’s body.
“I nearly lost a child. My daughter, on the other hand, is no longer here. She is 33 years old, she is considered missing, but they still haven’t found the body, we know nothing of her, we have lost her,” she expressed.
Although Jeremías stated that he saw his sister lifeless after the impact and his mother also stated that she believes he has lost her, Ana Martina remains officially listed among the missing persons. The failure to recover her remains keeps the family facing an especially painful situation.
Jeremías’s account allowed an inside view of the crash’s violence and the moments of despair lived by the passengers. It also gave voice to the drama of a family that, while supporting the recovery of one of its members, continues to wait for answers about Ana Martina’s fate.
