Marco Troper, son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, has died. He was 19. According to his grandmother, Troper was found at his UC Berkeley dorm and passed away from a suspected drug overdose.
Troper, a freshman at UC Berkeley, was found unresponsive on Tuesday afternoon in his dorm at Clark Kerr Campus. The cause of death is not currently known but there were no signs of foul play, according to the campus police.
“He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. … One thing we do know, it was a drug,” his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, told SFGATE. She described her grandson as “loving” and a “math genius”. “He was everything you could have wished for in a son and a grandson. He was destined to make a difference,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
In a Facebook post on Thursday, Esther mentioned that the family is “devastated beyond comprehension”.
“Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun and beautiful human being. He was just getting starting on his second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was truly loving it. He had a strong community of friends from his dorm at Stern Hall and his fraternity Zeta Psi and was thriving academically,” the post read.
“Marco's life was cut too short. And we are all devastated, thinking about all the opportunities and life experiences that he will miss and we will miss together. Marco, we all love you and miss you more than you will ever know.”
According to the Daily Post, Troper belonged to a well-known family in Silicon Valley. His mother, Susan, rented out her Menlo Park garage to her friends, Sergey Brin and Larry Page where they founded Google. She joined Page and Brin to become Google’s 16th employee. Her husband, Dennis Troper, is currently a Google executive.
“I think the most important thing is that teenagers and college students need to know that drugs today are not the same as the drugs of yesterday, they’re often laced with fentanyl. So while they think they know what they are doing if they were to look at the statistics nationwide, they can see that more people die of drug overdoses than from the pandemic,” Esther Wojcicki said.
Marco Troper is survived by his parents and four siblings.
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