Yazmin Yupangui loved flowers — tulips, especially. The 11-year-old girl would watch their petals slowly unfurl when she put them in water, blooming before her.
And she loved her older brother, Sandro Lala. She’d bounce on the trampoline while he played soccer in the yard of their Cambridge home. In the evenings, they’d walk down the road to the Cambridge Village Market to buy bags of spicy Takis corn chips that stained their fingers red.
When Sandro, 25, wasn’t working with his dad as a roofer, he and Yazmin biked along the country roads near their house — Sandro pedaling behind his little sister so he could keep an eye on her.
He was watching out for her until their final moments. On July 1, the siblings were part of a group fishing at a favorite spot along the Lamoille River when Yazmin fell into the water. Sandro dove in after her.
They never resurfaced. First responders recovered their bodies in the days that followed.
Sandro’s selfless action did not surprise their father, Luis Lala. The siblings were always together, he recalled in an interview conducted in Spanish with Seven Days. “Por eso se fueron los dos,” he said, meaning: “That’s why they both left us.”
Another, eerily similar tragedy struck the next day just 10 miles up the same river. The water was running high from recent rainstorms when Robert Coreno, 39, jumped in to help his 10-year-old daughter. He held her long enough for a neighbor to paddle out in a kayak. She was rescued; he was not.
“It was just a tragic coincidence,” said Lt. Charles Winn, commander of the Vermont State Police underwater recovery team, which responded to both accidents.
Coreno had just moved to Fairfax as part of a big blended family, according to a GoFundMe page created to raise money for his survivors, including three children. Yazmin and Sandro, too, were part of a blended family. They shared a house in Cambridge with family members.
A room in the home has been converted into a memorial to the siblings. Their photos hang on the wall above a table covered with bouquets of flowers, showing a smiling Yazmin posing in a ruffly turquoise dress. She had long black hair that hung almost to her waist. It was often braided in elaborate styles she found on YouTube and asked her mom to re-create.
She’d recently finished sixth grade at Cambridge Elementary School and was headed for middle school in the fall.
Yazmin was a “bright light,” school principal Kim Lesny said in a written statement. “She will be remembered for the joy she brought to those around her, and her loss is being deeply felt by classmates, staff members, and our entire school community.”
At the Cambridge Village Market, a donation bin is collecting money for the family. In a Facebook post, the owners said they’d match up to $5,000. A separate GoFundMe has raised more than $90,000.
Mary Russin-Densmore, the store’s evening manager, said donations at the store have been pouring in. She has known their family for years.
“To think that those two aren’t gonna walk through that door again really upsets me,” she said last week while working behind the counter.
Yazmin was born in New York City in 2014, about a month after her mother, Maria Yupangui, migrated alone to the United States from Suscal, a small town in Ecuador.
They moved in 2021 to Cambridge, where Yazmin was happiest when playing outside — floating on her back in the pool, searching for crayfish under rocks in the river while her brother fished, running around the yard with her dog, Toby.
To think that those two aren’t gonna walk through that door again really upsets me.
Mary Russin-Densmore
Sandro was her stepbrother. But the two had a bond like blood. He was born in Ecuador but came to the U.S. several years ago to join his father in the roofing business.
Yazmin’s mother described her as an energetic and curious girl who was content with the smallest things. She’d light up over a flower or a little piece of chocolate. She loved animals and had several pet birds over the years, including a blue parakeet and a parrot, who she named Selva, Spanish for “jungle.”
When Yazmin’s father and brother would come home from work at the end of the day, they’d often find her in the kitchen. “Do you want to eat?” she’d ask.
Yazmin could whip up smoothies and pancakes. For a cooking competition at school, she taught her classmates to make tacos from scratch — showing them how to prepare the masa dough for tortillas and flatten it into rounds. She was especially fond of beef tongue tacos.
“Mommy, don’t worry,” Yazmin used to say. “You have your own personal chef.”
She and Sandro would often pile onto a cushion in the living room with their younger brother, Erick, who is 5, to watch movies. Sandro happily tolerated Yazmin when she tugged on his ears or tied his hair into little ponytails.
He was patient and smart, his parents said. In his free time, he taught English to his other sister in Ecuador over the phone.
“Whatever he promised, he delivered,” said Maria Acosta, Sandro’s cousin.
When his father was detained in an immigration raid on his way to work last November, Sandro stepped up to care for his siblings and stepmother.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry, he will come back, and I will take care of you,’” Yupangui recalled. The elder Lala was released about a month later after a federal suit challenged the legality of his detention. Yazmin wrote a letter to the judge, asking for her father to be freed.
Young as she was, Yazmin served as her mother’s interpreter and often talked about saving money so she could buy them all a house and a plane ticket to fly her grandmother up from Ecuador. She understood that forces beyond her control kept the family splintered, but she wanted to make them whole.
Yazmin saved her birthday money in a piggy bank next to a stuffed capybara in her bedroom, which is decorated with her artwork of sea creatures. A Bible she received at her confirmation ceremony in April sits on a pink dresser.
“She always dreamed big,” Yupangui said of her daughter. “Of owning land, houses, animals, gardens and fruit trees.”
One of her dreams was that the family could travel to Ecuador together — an impossibility for immigration reasons. Last year, Yazmin flew there by herself for the first time. She bonded with her grandmother and learned about the place where her mom grew up, which she had only heard about in stories.
“It was as if she wanted to experience what life was like there now compared to what it used to be,” her mother said.
Soon, Yazmin will be accompanied by her brother for her second, and final, trip to Ecuador. The family is sending their bodies there, where they will be buried together. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Always Together | Cambridge mourns Ecuadorian siblings Yazmin Yupangui and Sandro Lala, whose bond defined their lives until the very end”
This article appears in July 15 • 2026.
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