Pedro Aguayo Ramirez, Perro Aguayo Jr., passed away early this morning. He was 35. Perro suffered fatal injuries during Friday night’s match in Tijuana. Reports indicate a ring rope snapped into his throat or head, and he fell to the mat unconscious. It was originally believed he was just selling, but he’d actually been knocked unconscious. Perro was rushed to the Del Padro hospital, and pronounced dead early Saturday morning.
There is video. I’m not going to be watching it or linking to it.
Perro is the second AAA employee to pass away tragically within days. Perro was a lynchpin of AAA, the led heel, the man all the big feuds for the future were built around and leader of the biggest heel group, a group that had spanned both CMLL and AAA. Perro was a person who had way too much life left for him to leave now – as a individual, as a family man.
This is a nightmare.
Update (11:48): MedioTiempo has an article with quotes from the Tijuana lucha commission doctor. Everyone watching the video, and watching live, observed there was no doctor’s aid right away and a makeshift stretcher. (In the video, Konnan appears to be the first to notice something’s horribly wrong.) The doctor explains there had been two other injuries on the card, including a spinal one, and the doctors were still treating them. The doctor says there were two ambulances present. It sounds like the spinal injury person was still on the stretcher, so the idea was to get Perro out of the ring as quick as possible with whatever they had. Perro was moved onto a stretcher before they got him into the ambulance.
Perro was worked on for an hour at the hospital, with a team of doctors trying to figure out what they could do, before they declared him dead. The official cause of death is “raíz de un golpe que tuvo en la región cervical”, which I believe translates to a spinal stroke.
Updated (2:00): Wrestling Observer says the doctor at the hospital called the injury as “cervical spine trauma”, believed to come from one of the two impacts of the rope into his throat. The doctor was unsure which one, though it appears it’s more likely the first.