Oliver Tree died on Sunday when the helicopter he was travelling in collided with another over Rio de Janeiro, killing six people in all. He was 32.
The crash quickly turned into a second emergency on the ground. One of the helicopters came down on the car park of a dealership and set around 20 vehicles ablaze, deepening the toll from a collision whose cause investigators have not yet explained.
The Military Fire Department of the State of Rio de Janeiro was called to the crash site around 09:00 local time, as authorities opened an investigation into what brought the two aircraft together. For now, the unanswered question is basic and central: whether the collision began with a loss of control, a navigational error or something else entirely.
Tree, born Oliver Tree Nickell in Santa Cruz, California, in 1993, first rose to fame in 2016 after going viral on social media. He was known for Life Goes On, Miss You and Alien Boy, had just begun a world tour and was next due to perform in Lisbon, Portugal, on 1 July, after a show in São Paulo, Brazil, on 6 June.
The crash also landed hard in the music world. KSI posted an emotional tribute on X, saying Tree should still have been here with so much life and music ahead of him. Steve-O said he was incredibly lucky to have become friends with Tree and shared a photograph of the two of them together, adding that Tree regularly checked in on him and cared how he was doing.
Tree’s death also closes the short arc of a career that kept widening. In 2020, he broke the Guinness world record for building the largest kick scooter, and in 2024 he was nominated for a Brit Award for Miss You alongside Robin Schulz. The investigation now has to answer the harder question left by Sunday’s crash: why two helicopters met over Rio de Janeiro, and why one of them ended up in flames on the ground.
