Victoria Zardoya

Victoria Zardoya was a 20 year old college student from New Jersey who became known to the public in the summer of 2026, when she died following a fall at the historic Fort Dade ruins on Egmont Key, a small island at the mouth of Tampa Bay, Florida. She was a student at the University of Tampa and had grown up in the Morristown and Montville area of New Jersey, where she graduated from Morristown Beard School in 2024. Before she died, friends and family described her as warm, close knit, and generous, and she had worked as a nanny for families in New Jersey.

Zardoya was not a public figure by profession. She became widely known because of her lifelong friendship with Milania Giudice, the youngest daughter of Teresa and Joe Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. The two had been close since childhood and later attended the University of Tampa together, and Zardoya was considered close to the wider Giudice family, who spoke of her as if she were one of their own.

On July 24, 2026, Zardoya flew to Florida for a weekend visit with friends. The group took a boat out to Egmont Key, a state park island that can only be reached by water, to explore the ruins of Fort Dade, a fortification built during the Spanish American War era. As the group was preparing to leave the ruins, Zardoya fell. Friends who were with her said what first looked like a short drop turned out to be a much longer fall onto a set of stairs below, leaving her with severe injuries. She was airlifted by medical helicopter to a hospital in critical condition.

She died two to three days later, with most reports citing July 26, 2026, as the date of her death, though a medical examiner's office statement to one outlet referenced July 27. She was 20 years old. An account of the day, shared on Instagram by her friend Victoria Silberbusch at the request of Zardoya's family, described the group staying with her and trying to comfort her while they waited for first responders. Zardoya was an organ donor, and her autopsy was delayed until early August so that organ donation could proceed first. It was completed on August 3, 2026.

The medical examiner's office later confirmed that Zardoya's cause of death was craniocerebral trauma, a severe brain injury, and that the manner of death was ruled an accident. In November 2026, toxicology results reported by TMZ showed that her blood contained ketamine, norketamine, alcohol, and the sedative etomidate, though officials have not said when or why those substances were present or whether they played any part in the fall.

Joe Giudice wrote publicly that Zardoya had been like a daughter to him, and the Giudice family shared tributes and childhood photographs across social media. Milania Giudice later got a tattoo in Zardoya's memory, and her mother Teresa has said Milania continued to grieve the loss months afterward. Friends also used the attention around Zardoya's death to push for safety improvements at the Fort Dade ruins, a popular but largely unsupervised historic site.