He was playing a soccer match, one of his hobbies, together with his brother and his lifelong friends. Then suddenly the illness, the fall to the ground and the tragedy.
Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done for a 30-year-old young man, Giampiero Garrido, who died yesterday evening, Thursday 22 January, on the former Corderia football pitch in Via Sparta, in the Genoese district of Sestri Ponente.
The arrival of help and the tragedy
It happened shortly after 8pm. The prompt intervention of the emergency services, the Green Cross of Sestri Ponente with the Golf 1 medical vehicle, was of no avail. Despite long attempts at resuscitation, the 30-year-old, suffering from cardiac arrest, did not make it and died in front of the eyes of his lifelong friends. He leaves behind a wife and three young children.
The Sestri Ponente carabinieri also arrived at the scene of the tragedy. The police have started investigations to reconstruct the exact dynamics of what happened.
The young man apparently suffered from previous heart problems.
The memory: “As a kid he ran on the football field chasing dreams”
A moving memory came from Carlo Besana, honorary president of Arci Pianacci, at Cep. Besana had met Garrido when, as a boy, he took part in the “Ceppions League”, one of the many initiatives put in place for young people in a difficult neighborhood.
“There is a shirt that stands out from the others – says Besana on social media -. It has no random colours, and does not recall any team in our championship. It is a shirt with horizontal white-green stripes, the unmistakable shirt of Celtic from Glasgow, the only Scottish team to have won a European Cup. On the back of the shirt, above the number 7, the name of Larsson stands out, Henrik ‘Henke’ Larsson, the Swedish striker who scored mountains of goals with the Celtic shirt, almost one per game. It is worn by a young boy who, perhaps, seeing that dreaming costs nothing, like many of his peers is pursuing the dream of following in his footsteps, finding a space in football that counts. Twenty years have passed, that boy has become a man, he no longer lives at Cep and has a beautiful family.”
Garrido did not follow in Larsson’s footsteps, but his passion for football remained intact and every now and then, in the evening, he finds it with friends. On Thursday evening, just as Celtic were celebrating the draw in Bologna, in the Europa League, “at the same time his friends, distraught, called for help. The doctors tried to resuscitate him for an hour, but there was nothing left to do” continues Besana.
His heart stopped on a football field, the same “on which as a child you run chasing everyone’s simple dreams” and on which “as an adult the race of life suddenly stops, leaving his friends, wife and three children dismayed”.
The other news of the day
