The 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found dead at the University of California, Berkeley, on Tuesday. His grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, confirmed the devastating news in a Facebook post.
The student, identified as Marco Tropper, was discovered unconscious in his dorm at the Clark Care Campus, a student housing complex, at around 4:23 p.m. local time. Despite immediate life-saving attempts by the Berkeley Fire Department, Trooper was pronounced dead at the scene.
The UCPD said no signs of foul play were detected, according to the New York Post.
The grieving grandmother took to Facebook to express her grief:
Tragedy struck my family yesterday. My beloved 19 year old grandson, Marco Trooper, passed away yesterday. Our family has been devastated beyond comprehension.
Marco was the most kind, loving, intelligent, fun and beautiful human being. He had just started the second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley, majoring in mathematics and really loving it.
He had a strong community of friends from his Stern Hall residence and his Zeta Psi fraternity and was thriving academically. At home, he told us endless stories about his life and his friends in Berkeley.
Marco's life was cut very short. And we are all devastated, thinking of all the opportunities and life experiences he will miss and we will miss together.
Marco, we all love you and miss you more than you will ever know.
Details surrounding Marco's cause of death remain unclear. Still, Esther Wojcicki suggested to SF Gate that she suspects a drug overdose claimed her grandson's life.
The family is awaiting a toxicology report to confirm details.
She said: “He took a drug, and we don't know what was inside him.” “The only thing we know is that he was drugged.”
“We want to prevent this from happening to any other family,” Esther Wojcicki added.
Susan Wojcicki was Youtube's CEO from 2014 to 2023. She resigned the day after the House GOP issued subpoenas for the CEOs of big tech companies Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. Although YouTube is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Wojcicki was not on the list of CEOs recalled.
Under Wojcicki's leadership, she has urged more governments to enact free speech laws to stamp out nonconsensual speech.
“Our recommendations to governments that want more control over online expression is to pass laws that clearly and clearly define that so that we can enforce it. Sometimes we see laws being implemented or it is suggested that they are not very clean or that we can interpret cleanly. We have also seen laws It was just passed for the Internet rather than laws for all forms of expression. “I think this is dangerous territory when we start getting into it and saying sure you can say something like this to a magazine or on TV but you can't say it on the Internet,” she said.
In April 2020, Wojcicki announced that anything said about the coronavirus that conflicted with the World Health Organization's talking points would be deleted. Now we know that the WHO, like the CDC, has been lying all along.
Wojcicki was also responsible for the Infowars YouTube account being suspended again.
“Committing to openness is not easy,” Wojcicki said. “Sometimes it means leaving out content that is outside the mainstream, controversial, or even offensive. But I believe that listening to a broad range of viewpoints ultimately makes us a stronger, more informed society, even if we… We disagree with some of these opinions.
This led InfoWars War Room host, Owen Shroyer, to create a new YouTube account, which her position should also apply to.
In a satirical video, Shroyer announced that YouTube had announced the lifting of the ban on InfoWars, which, of course, was not actually the case. However, based on Wojcicki's statement, the InfoWars team immediately created a new War Room account.
The account remained active overnight, with the video he posted widely shared across other platforms. The account was immediately removed when Vice News decided to write about it. An update to their article appears to modestly brag about their role in censorship: “Shortly after this story was published, YouTube deleted Infowars’ War Room channel,” the message read.
