The son of former “Nightline” anchor Ted Koppel was found dead in a Washington Heights apartment after a day of binge drinking, police said yesterday.
“It’s very sad,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday. “I know Ted casually, and I don’t know how anybody deals with losing a child.”
Andrew Koppel, 40, was declared dead around 1:30 a.m. on Monday at the apartment he was brought to by a man he had been drinking with all day Sunday.
Koppel met Russell Wimberly, a 32-year-old waiter, Sunday afternoon at Smith’s Bar in Hell’s Kitchen. He reportedly swigged Jameson between bar stops the two made into the night. Wimberly took him to the apartment at Audubon Avenue and 180th Street around 11 p.m. By that time Koppel was reportedly incoherent.
“We took him into the bedroom and laid him down to rest,” Belinda Caban, 53, who lives in the apartment, told the New York Post. A few hours later, they found Koppel had urinated and defecated in bed and wasn’t breathing. He was pronounced dead when the ambulance arrived.
Additional tests on autopsy results, including toxicology, were needed to determine the cause of his death. No criminality was suspected, police said.
Koppel, who was an attorney for the city’s Housing Authority until resigning in 2008, lived in Queens with his girlfriend and baby daughter.
