dpOne night last September, David Samson got a text from his middle child, Kyra, with a photo capturing an average day at her dream job. She was on the set of “Jeopardy!”, the game show she worked on as a production coordinator, with a buzzer in her right hand and a smile across her face.
The next morning, Samson, a former Major League Baseball executive who now hosts a popular sports podcast, traded texts with his daughter as they prepared for their respective shows’ tapings. Break a leg. Love you.
Then “Jeopardy!” producer Michael Davies phoned Samson from the set.
“I’m calling you not as Kyra’s boss but as a friend and a father,” Davies told him. “There’s something going on with Kyra.”
That call set off a series of ambulance rides, specialist assessments and scans. Kyra was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive form of brain cancer. She was rushed to surgery to resect a tumor on her frontal lobe, the first step in nine months of treatment around the world.
Kyra died Tuesday. She was 28.
“We’re all combining sadness and grief with unbelievable amounts of gratefulness, because she didn’t get cheated for those 28 years. Not for a day,” Samson said by phone Thursday afternoon. “But she has been cheated now for what could have been.”
There has been an outpouring of support from across the sports and entertainment industries in the past two days, with roughly $250,000 raised for “The Kyra Fund,” a partnership between her family and the Glioblastoma Research Organization to raise funds for combatting the disease.
“I want Kyra to be the statistic — one of the catalysts that helped stop this pain from impacting other families and other young people,” Samson said. “I want her to be the end of the road of this devastation. It’s a ravaging, unbelievable disease: One day, that’s it, and there’s no going back.”
Samson poses with Andy Cohen, the host of “Watch What Happens Live.” (Courtesy of the Samson family)
The family didn’t share Kyra’s diagnosis until Samson announced her death in an Instagram post on Wednesday, a choice they made, her father said, because Kyra always spoke for herself. She was the best person to tell her story. And she told the greatest stories.
Kyra was born on April 14, 1998, in New York to Cindi Jacobs and Samson. She had a big personality and a small stature. (“A familiar thing in our family,” her father said.) She was 1 when Samson’s stepfather, Jeffrey Loria, became the Montreal Expos’ principal owner and hired Samson as a club executive. Her earliest memories were in Montreal and Miami, as Loria and Samson moved on to the Marlins.
Growing up in a prominent family, Kyra understood the power of a platform and a microphone. She interned in the entertainment industry while studying at Northwestern University. After graduating, she landed a role as a production assistant on the Bravo show “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.” She had a knack for knowing what to prioritize in a fast-paced production and doing it efficiently.
The “magic of Kyra,” Samson said, was her ability to make anyone feel comfortable — actors, athletes, professors, children — and navigate the complexities of any room she entered.
“I’ve seen her navigate a world that in many cases is unnavigable,” her father said.
That was even more true after she got sick, he added.
Kyra never stopped fighting the disease, her father said. (Courtesy of the Samson family)
Kyra moved to Los Angeles after joining “Jeopardy!” in March 2025, but the show was taping in Chicago on Sept. 12 when colleagues noticed her acting strangely. At urgent care, a doctor quickly called for an ambulance to whisk her to Northwestern Medical Hospital. Within a few hours, an emergency-room doctor told Samson and Jacobs, who divorced in 2019, that they had found a mass on Kyra’s brain.
Soon, standing outside the hospital and consumed by his inability to help his daughter, Samson called a man he’s known for decades: MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. When Manfred answered, Samson wasn’t sure what to say. He went with the words whirling around his head: “I think my daughter just got diagnosed with brain cancer.”
The baseball community began rallying behind Samson well before he first publicly disclosed his daughter was sick. The league connected Samson with doctors involved with “Stand Up to Cancer” and some of the top neuro-oncologists in the country.
Former New York Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon put Samson in touch with their business partners at NYU Langone Health, and within two hours, plans were formulated to transfer Kyra to New York. The resources available to their family were a blessing in a time of desperation, Samson said, but also made him acutely aware of how difficult it would be for most families in the same situation to get adequate care.
“Navigating our healthcare system these last nine months was unconscionably impossible — and I’m one of the luckiest people in the world,” Samson said. “I don’t know how it works for people who don’t have access, who don’t have connections. I can’t even (articulate) how sorry I am for that.”
Publicly, Samson’s show went on, as he felt Kyra would have wanted. He returned to hosting podcasts after a few weeks away. Kyra took great pride in her father’s work, and no one gave him better advice and notes on his show, “Nothing Personal with David Samson.” The last podcast Kyra heard her father on was a “Pablo Torre Finds Out” investigation that later won a Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. (The Athletic signed a licensing deal with “Pablo Torre Finds Out.”)
“There is life before the phone call and life after the phone call, and there is never going back,” he said then. “You cannot go back. You figure out what a new normal can be. You figure it out as quickly as you can when you are surrounded by a sea of verbiage that you don’t understand, scared to your core, trying to gain control of a situation that is not able to be controlled by anyone under any scenario.”
Last fall, when chemotherapy and radiation caused Kyra’s hair to fall out, Samson shaved his head and grew a burly beard. Thousands of emails poured in from listeners. He received a message Thursday from a parent whose child died by suicide. They said listening had helped them navigate their grief.
Even as Samson returned to the mic, Kyra’s family remained at her side: her mother, her sister Hannah Hager, brother-in-law Ryan Hager and brother Caleb Samson. The toll brain cancer takes on caregivers is immense, Samson said, and “there’s no way anyone could be a better mother or caregiver than Cindi was.”
The nine months were a nightmarish, never-ending pursuit of ways to save Kyra’s life. After the initial surgery, there was the chemotherapy and radiation. Earlier this month, she spent a week in Germany participating in a treatment program. “She was fighting up until the end,” Samson said. “We would have gone anywhere in the world — anywhere — to get her any sort of treatment that could have helped.”
Kyra never made a full cognitive recovery after Sept. 12.
“The location of her tumor made it impossible for the old Kyra to continue,” Samson said. “There was a new Kyra that fought valiantly, with unbelievable resolve. The disease just was overwhelming.”
Samson poses for a photo with her fiance, William Truesdell. (Courtesy of the Samson family)
When Kyra was first admitted to the hospital, her parents phoned her boyfriend, William Truesdell. He and Kyra met at Northwestern and had dated for eight years, but they referred to each other as “forever fiances.” Samson told him, “Get on a red-eye. Kyra needs you in Chicago.”
When Truesdell landed, Kyra was already in surgery.
“He has been by her side every day since,” Samson said.
One day in January, when Kyra was back home in Los Angeles, Truesdell walked in with a diamond ring and proposed. Forever fiances.
These are the stories and scenes Samson is sorting through as he prepares to eulogize his daughter Sunday at a private funeral. There are the memories of her as a little girl; the delight he took in watching her career take off; the warmth of her relationships with all of those surrounding her.
One moment, Samson laughs as he tells a story about Kyra. The next, he spirals into the darkness of the past nine months. “The hole in our family is unthinkable,” he says. “I don’t know how to fill it.” Thinking about creating Kyra’s legacy with the fund has given his mind something to rest on: “I’m not going to be silent about Kyra — ever,” he says. “I won’t allow anyone to forget her. She’s unforgettable.”
On Thursday, Samson pulled up the photo of Kyra on the “Jeopardy!” set. He treasures it now. He marvels at the serenity of that moment, given what came next. Even in the fog of grief, he knows one thing to be true — if only he can find the words to say it.
“I’m lucky,” Samson said. “It’s a strange thing to articulate: To say you feel lucky when your child dies at 28 years old would make me sound like the robot that people think I am.
“But that luck is based on the lifetime of experiences that we had with her, and the lifetime of things she accomplished. If she had been permitted to live longer, there just would have been more of that. But I am thankful for what there was.”
