The son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was found dead in a college dorm Tuesday.
Marco Troper, 19, was a freshman at UC Berkeley. He is suspected of having overdosed on drugs.
“He ingested a drug and we don’t know what was in it,” Troper’s grandmother, Esther Wojcicki, told SFGATE. “One thing we know is that it was a drug.” The family, she added, is awaiting a toxicology report that could help confirm the cause of death, but it could take up to a month.
“I think the most important thing is for teenagers and college students to know that today’s drugs are not the same as yesterday’s drugs, they’re often laced with fentanyl,” Esther Wojcicki told the Daily mail in Palo Alto.
A university spokesperson wrote Fortune: “We can confirm that Marco Troper, a first-year freshman at UC Berkeley, has died. He had an undeclared major in the College of Letters & Science. We do not know the cause of death, which will need to be determined by the medical examiner’s office.”
According to the University of California Police Department there were “no signs of foul play” and an investigation is ongoing.
“Our family is devastated beyond comprehension,” Esther Wojcicki wrote in a Facebook post. “Marco was the kindest, most loving, smartest, funniest, most beautiful human being. He was just starting the second semester of his freshman year at UC Berkeley, majoring in mathematics, and he really loved it.”
The family is well known in Silicon Valley. Susan Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, when she was a marketing manager at Intel. She went on to work for many years at Google, including as head of YouTube, a role she resigned from last year.
Anne Wojcicki, Susan’s sister, is the co-founder and CEO of the personal genomics company 23andMe, and was previously married to Brin.
Esther Wojcicki wrote a 2019 book titled How to raise successful people and, as a journalism teacher, he mentored Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Troper’s grandfather, the late Stanley Wojcicki, was the chair of Stanford’s physics department. He died last year.
“Marco’s life was cut too short,” Esther Wojcicki wrote in her Facebook post. “And we are all devastated, thinking of all the opportunities and life experiences that he will miss and that we will miss together. Marco, we all love you and miss you more than you could ever imagine.