Former YouTube CEO’s son found dead in UC Berkeley dorm

Marco Troper, 19, was a freshman at UC Berkeley. A drug overdose is suspected. 

“He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it,” Troper’s grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, advised SFGATE. “One factor we do know, it was a drug.” The household, she added, is awaiting a toxicology report that might assist affirm the reason for demise, nevertheless it would possibly take as much as a month.

“I believe a very powerful factor is that youngsters and faculty college students have to know that medicine right now usually are not the identical because the medicine of yesterday, they’re typically laced with fentanyl,” Esther Wojcicki advised the Day by day Submit in Palo Alto.

A college spokesperson wrote to Fortune: “We will affirm that Marco Troper, a first-year freshman at UC Berkeley, has died. He was an undeclared main within the School of Letters & Science. We have no idea the reason for demise, that’s to be decided by the coroner’s workplace.”

There have been “no indicators of foul play” and an investigation is underway, based on the College of California Police Division.

“Our household is devastated past comprehension,” Esther Wojcicki wrote in a Fb put up. “Marco was probably the most variety, loving, good, enjoyable and exquisite human being He was simply getting beginning on his second semester of his freshman 12 months at UC Berkeley majoring in math and was actually loving it.”

The household is well-known in Silicon Valley. Susan Wojcicki rented her storage in Menlo Park to Google’s founders—Larry Web page and Sergey Brin—in 1998, when she was a advertising supervisor at Intel. She went on to work for a few years at Google, together with as the top of YouTube, a job she stepped down from final 12 months. 

Anne Wojcicki, Susan’s sister, is the cofounder and CEO of the non-public genomics agency 23andMe, and was beforehand married to Brin.

Esther Wojcicki wrote a 2019 e-book entitled Easy methods to Elevate Profitable Individuals and, as a journalism trainer, mentored Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs.

Troper’s grandfather, the late Stanley Wojcicki, was chairman of Stanford’s physics division. He died final 12 months.

“Marco’s life was minimize too brief,” Esther Wojcicki wrote in her Fb put up. “And we’re all devastated, fascinated by all of the alternatives and life experiences that he’ll miss and we’ll miss collectively. Marco, all of us love you and miss you greater than you’ll ever know.”