It is a parent’s worst nightmare.
Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was discovered dead at UC Berkeley, presumably due to a drug overdose, as confirmed by his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki. The news became widely known yesterday, although Wojcicki had posted it on Facebook several days earlier, stating: “Tragedy hit my family yesterday. My beloved grandson Marco Troper, age 19 passed away yesterday. Our family is devastated beyond comprehension. Marco was the most kind, loving, smart, fun, and beautiful human being. He was just getting started 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. At home, he would tell us endless stories of his life and friends at Berkeley.”
UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore stated that there were no signs of foul play and that an investigation into the death is underway.
Esther Wojcicki discussed her grandson’s passing with the Palo Alto Daily, saying, “Kids in college, especially freshmen and sophomores, experiment with everything. I think this was an experiment that went wrong.” She separately told the San Francisco Chronicle: “He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. One thing we do know, it was a drug.”
Wojcicki stepped down as CEO of the Alphabet-owned subsidiary one year ago, stating in a blog post that after nine years in the role, she had “decided to start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I’m passionate about.”
Neal Mohan, then YouTube’s chief product officer, has been leading the organization since.
I did not have the chance to interview Wojcicki during her tenure as CEO. I recall being intrigued by her appearance at a Fortune event in Aspen back in 2015 as she responded to questions about how she managed an all-encompassing job while also being a mother to five children. Her interviewer, veteran reporter Adam Lashinsky, was later teased in an interview with brothers Ari and Rahm Emanuel, who noted that Lashinsky had not inquired about their children at all. Yet, as a working mother of two children and having a significantly less-demanding job at the time, I was also curious about how Wojcicki — who had just given birth to her youngest child before the event — balanced it all.
Significantly, she did not reject the question. Instead, she discussed associating her different children with different stages of Google’s growth, after stating, “‘You’re pretty busy’ is maybe the short answer. I love kids, I love work, and I think at some level I just love creating things and building. And like kids are very rewarding projects. Building companies is rewarding too, and I enjoy doing both.”
My heart now aches for Wojcicki and her family, known well beyond their home in Silicon Valley, including 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki; Susan and Anne’s sister Janet, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco; and their mother Esther Wojcicki, a renowned educator who has extensively written on how to raise successful children.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Esther Wojcicki told the SF Chronicle that the family is engaging with the media partly to “prevent this from happening to any other family.”
“Tragedy is very hard to sustain,” she told the Chronicle. “It makes you want to hide in a closet and never come out. But I think the main thing is that we need to push forward to see what we can do to help other people so there won’t be any other kids who end up like Marco.”
Possibly, his death has already initiated widespread discussions. Following news of it yesterday, I reminded my own children about the perils of today’s drugs, how amazingly precious life is, and that no one is immune to catastrophe.
