David Samson announces passing of daughter Kyra after battle with brain cancer

David Samson announced on Wednesday that his 28-year-old daughter, Kyra, has died.

“Yesterday, my daughter, Kyra, passed away peacefully after a 9 month and 11 day fight against one of the cruelest diseases I’ve ever seen up close,” Samson wrote on X. “She was diagnosed with Brain Cancer, specifically Glioblastoma. I have felt all of your concern and love for these months and wasn’t ready to be anymore specific than I was.”

Yesterday, my daughter, Kyra, passed away peacefully after a 9 month and 11 day fight against one of the cruelest diseases I’ve ever seen up close. She was diagnosed with Brain Cancer, specifically Glioblastoma. I have felt all of your concern and love for these months and… pic.twitter.com/sVWH39UICA

— David P. Samson (@DavidPSamson) June 24, 2026

The former Miami Marlins president had been sharing the contours of his family’s ordeal with his Nothing Personal audience since September, when he disappeared from the show for two weeks following a phone call that arrived right after his Sept. 12 episode. He returned on Sept. 29, informing his audience that one of his daughters had fallen seriously ill out of nowhere, though at the time he did not specify the illness or name her publicly.

“There is life before the phone call and life after the phone call, and there is never going back,” he said then. “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.”

He acknowledged that he’d stayed quiet while it was happening, not out of a desire for privacy, but because he simply wasn’t ready.

“I wasn’t ready to talk about it,” he said. “I wasn’t ready to think about it other than to do what was in front of me, which was to figure out how to deal with something that is unthinkable, unimaginable, can’t be happening. And you open your eyes 24 hours a day, and it happens.”

In the weeks that followed, David Samson appeared on Pablo Torre Finds Out and offered further reflection on what the family was living through, articulating a helplessness that ran counter to everything that had defined him.

“I don’t have control over anything. Nothing,” he told Torre in early October. “I can’t make my daughter better. I can’t put my family back together. I can’t control when the doctors call me back. I can’t control when test results come. I can’t control one thing.”

In November, Samson shaved his head on-air in solidarity after his daughter’s treatment caused her hair to fall out. He described asking her whether she’d want the family to join her, and said she indicated she’d enjoy being part of the process.

“When you go to a hospital every day to get treatment, and your hair starts falling out, and you recognize what hair means in terms of vanity, you realize that vanity takes a step behind living,” he said. “And I don’t mean a small step.”

Samson — who has also grown out his beard — stated that he found himself unrecognizable after the haircut, which only made him reflect further on the gesture’s symbolic nature.

“Hair will exist again. Hair can grow back, no matter where your male pattern balding is. No matter whether it’s thin or thick or different color, different texture,” Samson said. “The concept of hair regrowth is a concept that I cannot relate to in any way because what we’re dealing with is something that, in theory, is not able to be controlled. But yet you embark on a journey where you try to figure out ways to gain control of the uncontrollable.”

In his announcement on Wednesday, David Samson described Kyra as a young woman who “loved deeply and who is impossible to describe in 280 characters,” and said that while her life was stolen from her, she faced the nine months of illness “with courage, poise, and resolve.”

“All I want is for no family to feel what we feel today,” he wrote. “For no young person to suffer the way she did.”

In lieu of flowers, Samson asked those moved to contribute to The Kyra Fund at fundraise.gbmresearch.org/thekyrafund, which he said will be used solely to research treatments for glioblastoma.