Marco Troper, the 19-year-old son of Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, was discovered unresponsive in his dorm at the University of California, Berkeley. Troper, in his second semester as a freshman, was found on Tuesday, February 13, 2024, at the Clark Kerr Campus, a student housing facility.
The University of California Police Department, Berkeley, was informed around 4:23 p.m. by the Berkeley Fire Department, that emergency responders were attempting to resuscitate Troper. Despite their efforts, he was declared deceased soon after. Preliminary reports from campus law enforcement indicate no evidence of foul play in Troper’s passing.
Marco’s grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, a prominent author and educator known for her book “How to Raise Successful People,” expressed to a local news outlet her suspicion that her grandson’s premature death could be due to a drug overdose, saying “He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. … One thing we do know, it was a drug.”
The family is currently awaiting a toxicology report to establish the precise cause of death, a process which could take up to a month.
In a heartfelt Facebook post, the grandmother conveyed the family’s immense grief, recalling Marco as a kind, intelligent, and vibrant individual. She mentioned his passion for his math studies, his close-knit group of friends from Stern Hall and the Zeta Psi fraternity, and his flourishing academic life. Esther Wojcicki stated that the family was grappling with an immense void left by the loss of a young individual who had shown extraordinary potential.
This unfortunate event has sparked discussions about the risk of drug use among young adults. Esther Wojcicki is advocating for an awareness campaign about the increasing danger of narcotics, which could be laced with deadly substances like fentanyl.
While the University of California, Berkeley has acknowledged Troper’s death, details about the cause are still undisclosed, pending investigation by the Alameda County coroner’s office.
Susan Wojcicki is renowned for her significant tenure as YouTube’s CEO from 2014 to 2023 and her influential role at Google, where she developed key advertising and analytics products such as AdWords, AdSense, and Google Analytics.
Her early engagement with Google is marked by her providing her garage to its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, serving as the young company’s first headquarters.
In addition to his mother and grandmother, Marco is survived by his father, Dennis Troper and four siblings. The extended family, which includes several prominent figures in the tech and education sectors like Susan’s sisters, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, and UC San Francisco professor Janet Wojcicki, is now dealing with this personal tragedy.
