YouTube gaming star Trevor Heitmann zoomed down a San Diego highway going in the wrong direction on Thursday, crashing into an oncoming SUV and killing its two passengers as well as himself. Another driver on the scene was seriously injured, reports The San Diego Tribune, after flaming wreckage and debris flew across freeway lanes onto other vehicles.
The victims were 12-year-old Aryana Pizzaro — who was set to start the seventh grade today and had aspirations of becoming a jazz singer, her older brother told the Tribune — and her mother, Aileen Pizzaro, a marriage and family counselor who often worked with children who had been removed from abusive homes.
The family has launched a memorial fund on GoFundMe to pay for funeral costs and additional expenses related to Aileen and Aryana’s deaths. It has raised $54,000 of a $5,000 goal in just two days. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson — of whom Aileen was a huge fan — also shared a video expressing his condolences. “I’m just sending so much love and light and strength your way from my family to yours,” Johnson told Aileen’s son, Angelo, in a Twitter video.
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It is unknown why exactly 1-year-old Heitmann was roaring down the highway in his $250,000 McLaren at speeds estimated to be roughly 100 mph, per the Tribune, though friends said that he had fallen on hard financial times. Prior to merging onto the highway, Heitmann’s father had called the police after he had sped away from their home, hitting another family car. And after that, Heitmann reportedly crashed through a metal gate at a local elementary school before getting out of his car and smashing a window — though nobody was injured in either of those incidents.
Heitmann, known by his online moniker McSkillet, had amassed 900,000 subscribers on YouTube for his Counter Strike: Global Offensive videos. He had also made quite a bit of money in skin gambling — in which players use cosmetic game elements as virtual currency to bet on match outcomes. One of McSkillets friends said that Counter Strike developer Valve had recently confiscated about $200,000 worth of his skins, according to the Tribune, and banned him from selling more under order from the Washington state gambling commission.
