Drinking

City Housing Attorney Andrew Koppel -- 'A Slobbering Mess' -- Found Dead

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If you’ve ever had an alcohol problem or even if you’ve been out on an epic bender, the death of Ted Koppel’s son is pretty much your worst nightmare. From the New York Post:

Andrew Koppel, 40, of Rockaway Park, Queens, was declared dead at around 1:30 a.m. after paramedics were called to the rundown apartment in what a law-enforcement source called a “s- – – building” on 180th Street at Audubon Avenue, where he had been found unconscious and not breathing in a bedroom, the sources said.

Koppel — who was an attorney for the city Housing Authority — was a slobbering mess when he was brought to the apartment at around 11 p.m.

Deaths like these always make me think about how rampant alcoholism is in the legal profession and in the country generally. According to reports, this last time alcohol got the best of Andrew Koppel was not the first time…

The Post reports that Koppel had a series of alcohol related incidents before his end:

Andrew Koppel was convicted in 1993 of punching out a senatorial aide in a drunken dust-up in DC and was ordered into alcohol treatment. Three years earlier, he got into a drunken fender bender while driving his father’s Mercedes in their home state of Maryland.

The thing is — and I know there are a lot of people out there are with me on this one — many of the “dude had a drinking problem” stories that are flooding the tabloids today are things that regular, well-adjusted adults do all of the time. A “drunken dust-up” is what they call a bar fight when you are the son of somebody famous. (Please tell me that I’m not the only person here that has been in couple of bar fights.)

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I imagine that I’m not the only person in the room that has started drinking at noon and was a “slobbering mess” when I got to — wherever — at 1:30 in the morning. For the love of God, when the U.S. soccer team takes on England that’ll be, what, 3:30 p.m. here on the East Coast? I know I’m not going to be the only World Cup watcher up in here that starts drinking then and continues until somebody puts me in a cab — and that’s if we lose.

That type of behavior can kill you?

We know it can, but it only seems to happen to “other people.” Other people like Andrew Koppel — a random city attorney, a dude who wouldn’t even make the papers if his dad weren’t famous.

Koppel’s death is a tragedy; it’s also a warning to all of the alcoholics and binge drinkers out there to occasionally remember that moderation, while boring, is safer than the alternative.

Koppel son dies after a bender [New York Post]

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