Oliver Tree was killed when the helicopter he was travelling in collided with another over Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, leaving six people dead in all. One of the aircraft then dropped onto the car park of a dealership and set about 20 vehicles ablaze.
The crash was called in around 09:00 local time, or 12:00 GMT, by the Military Fire Department of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Tree was 32.
The death has cut short a world tour that had already taken him through São Paulo on 6 June and was due to continue in Lisbon on 1 July, before dates in Glasgow, Manchester and London in September. For fans searching his name now, the scale of the wreckage is only part of the shock: the helicopter collision ended with fire on the ground and six dead in the air.
What has not been explained is why the helicopters hit each other. Authorities said an investigation into the cause of the collision was under way, but no account has yet filled that gap. The helicopter Tree was on carried pilot Alexandre Souza and passengers Lucas Brito Chaves and Lucas Vignale, while the second aircraft’s manifest listed only Charles Marsillac as pilot; Gaspar Prim Diaz, known as Gaspi, was also believed to have been aboard.
Tree, born Oliver Tree Nickell in Santa Cruz, California in 1993, first rose to fame in 2016 after going viral on social media and later became known for Life Goes On, Miss You and Alien Boy. He was nominated for a Brit Award in 2024 for Miss You with Robin Schulz and broke a Guinness world record in 2020 for building a kick scooter 4.16m tall and 3.13m long. Steve-O said online that he was “incredibly lucky” to become friends with Tree, adding that Tree checked in on him regularly and was “such a great person,” while KSI wrote that he could not believe he was typing about the death and called Tree a legend.
The investigation now has the burden of answering the one question that matters most: how two helicopters ended up colliding over Rio de Janeiro in the first place.
