Marco Trooper, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and her husband Dennis Trooper, was tragically found dead on Feb. 13, 2024, in his dormitory room at UC Berkeley.
Trooper was studying to major in Maths and was in his second semester of freshman year at the university’s College of Letters & Science. Speaking to SFGATE, Esther Wojcicki, Trooper’s grandmother, said her grandson was achieving great academic results, that he was “athletic,” “loving,” “gregarious,” and was “everything you could have wished for in a son and a grandson.” He was also described as a genius at mathematics who was truly enjoying his course.
Marco Trooper’s cause of death
Marco Trooper was found unresponsive in his dorm room at around 4 pm on a Tuesday. Despite paramedics’ best efforts to revive him, the 19-year-old was declared dead at the scene.
From the beginning, even before an autopsy and toxicology tests were performed, the family was aware that his passing had been due to drug consumption. Esther Wojcicki said, while the investigation was ongoing, “He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it. […] One thing we do know, it was a drug.”
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office’s coroner’s toxicology report described high concentrations of cocaine in Trooper’s system, in addition to amphetamine (a stimulant drug sometimes legally used to treat ADHD), alprazolam (otherwise best known as Xanax), hydroxyzine (an antihistamine medication sold under the name Atarax or Vistaril, also prescribed to those suffering from anxiety), and THC.
The medical examiner considered Trooper’s levels of alprazolam and cocaine to be the determining factor in his untimely passing.
This year has been devastating for the Trooper-Wojcicki family. Six months after her son’s accidental overdose, Susan Wojcicki died on Saturday, Aug. 10, after a two-year-long fight against lung cancer. She was 56 years old and is survived by her husband and four children.