Inside Congregation Kol Emeth’s sanctuary for the funeral of 19-year-old Marco Troper, his four siblings sang “Yellow” by Coldplay — an ode to his favorite color and warm personality.
Troper, the son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and longtime Google executive Dennis Troper, died unexpectedly on Feb. 13. His body was found in his UC Berkeley dorm, according to campus police.
The family is waiting on the results of a toxicology test to determine the cause of death, though his grandmother Esther Wojcicki told SFGate that she suspects he died of a drug overdose.
“We’re all in shock and very, very sad and really missing Marco,” Susan Wojcicki told J. “He was a really important member of our family. We never expected this to happen.”
He was the middle child of five brothers and sisters. Wojcicki said she spoke or texted with him almost daily.
“Marco was super caring with his siblings,” Dennis Troper told J., noting that his son was incredibly close with his younger sisters, who are 16 and 9. “With the 16-year-old, she would go to Marco for questions related to her physics and math homework, and he would always be very, very happy to help her with it.”
A Los Altos native, Troper was enjoying his second semester at UC Berkeley and was a member of Zeta Psi fraternity, Wojcicki said. He intended to major in math and recently qualified for the 2024 American Invitational Mathematics Exam, a prestigious competition. He had also contributed to an academic article on Harris graphs.
“He had an incredible love of learning and incredible ability to absorb, specifically math and scientific information,” Wojcicki said.
Troper attended Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School in Palo Alto through fifth grade and completed middle and high school at Menlo School in Atherton.
“He stood out in amazing ways,” Amy Watenmaker, Troper’s fifth-grade teacher at Hausner, recalled in an email to J.
“He asked for more math challenges. He asked us to teach more geography. And he even wrote an entire book of poetry about Iceland during our poetry unit. I will always think of him and his light, his humor and his love of learning,” Watenmaker wrote.
He had an incredible love of learning and incredible ability to absorb, specifically math and scientific information.
During his Feb. 21 funeral service at Kol Emeth in Palo Alto, Wojcicki read aloud a portion of a college essay that Troper wrote about his passion for math.
“Math brings me peace; it’s the only thing in my life that has pure, unbiased certainty. Math also quenches my desire to understand ‘why,’” he had written.
“Almost every answer to every question can be responded to with, ‘why,’ to which another answer can be given and again responded to with the three-letter word. If it’s done enough times, all questions eventually break down into questions about math and logic, the same way biology is simply applied chemistry, which is applied physics, which is applied math,” he wrote.
Troper aspired to apply his love of math to a career in artificial intelligence, Wojcicki said. He came from a long line of Silicon Valley academics and technology executives.
Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 after working for 25 years at Google, which owns the video service.
Troper’s father, a director of product management at Google, has worked at the company for more than 20 years. He serves on the board of Camp Tawonga, the Jewish summer camp near Yosemite National Park, and has served on the board of Hausner.
Troper’s maternal aunts are Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of the genomics and biotech company 23andMe, and Janet Wojcicki, a Fulbright-winning anthropologist and professor at UCSF. His grandmother Esther Wojcicki is a journalist and educator. His grandfather Stanley Wojcicki, who died last year, was a Stanford University physics professor.
During his years at Menlo, Troper played golf and boxed recreationally and was on the school’s tennis team. He also co-founded the school’s Jewish Affinity Group to celebrate Jewish culture and values, which often involved sharing food tied to Jewish holidays, enjoying challah at their weekly lunchtime meetings and leading community service projects.
Troper almost never left home without his signature pair of Crocs and had a playful, nurturing personality that made him a well-loved babysitter to many kids during his high school years, Wojcicki recalled.
“He had lots of kids that he loved to take care of,” she said. “He did an excellent job.”
Wojcicki told the friends and family gathered at his funeral service that the rainy weather had also created many rainbows in the days following his death, which she sees as signs of Troper’s spirit.
“We were coming back from the funeral home and we just saw rainbows everywhere. On the left, on the right. We saw double rainbows,” she told J. “We just feel like rainbows are the way that Marco is continuing to greet us and tell us that he’s still in our lives.”