By Olivia Scheck
DNAinfo Reporter Producer
MANHATTAN — Andrew "Drew" Koppel, the son of news anchor Ted Koppel who was found dead Monday after a day of heavy drinking, left behind a young daughter and may have had had another baby on the way, according to reports.
The New York Post published a photo of Koppel's girlfriend, Ilona Lieberman, leaving the couple's Rockaway Park home Tuesday with their crying 2-year-old daughter in tow. The paper said she appeared visibly pregnant.
This heartbreaking revelation helped mark the stark contrast between Drew Koppel the substance abuser, found dead in a Washington Heights apartment, and Drew Koppel the beloved son and father.
"Our son, Andrew, was a brilliant, caring man, whose loss we will mourn for the rest of our lives," Ted Koppel and his wife, Grace, said in a statement cited by the Daily News.
And neighbors of Koppel, who lived with Lieberman, their young daughter Alice and Lieberman's parents in Queens, said that they never saw him drinking around the house, the New York Post reported.
However, others said they knew a different version of Koppel, who died after a 12-hour drinking binge with a man he'd met in a bar earlier that day.
A second man, who told the Post he'd met Koppel in a Rockaway Park bar last year, described him as being "drunk out of his mind" and claimed that he drove home on a motorcycle while intoxicated.
"He was drunk to the point where the owner and the bartender had to tell him, 'You're done. Leave the bike here,' but he wouldn't listen," the unidentified bar patron told the paper.
Koppel, 40, had recently quit his longtime job as a lawyer for the Housing Authority, according to the paper.
A close friend of the family, who went unnamed, confirmed that Koppel had "many substance abuse issues," according to the Post, but noted that he still found the news "shocking."
Koppel was brought to an apartment at West 180th Street and Audubon Avenue Sunday to sober up by a 32-year-old waiter, Russell Wimberly, whom Koppel met earlier in the day at Smith's Bar & Restaurant at West 44th Street and Ninth Avenue.
“He was really messed up,” said Belinda Caban, 53, who lives at the apartment where Wimberly brought Koppel. “I just thought he was high out of his mind, drunk out of his mind.”
Caban said she was deeply disturbed by what had happened in her apartment and couldn't sleep all day Monday because of the shock.
“It hurt me to know that he died in my house,” she said. “I wish I would have known that something was really wrong with him.”
Police said they do not suspect criminality, but that the case is still under investigation.
An autopsy conducted Monday was "inconclusive," a spokeswoman for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner told DNAinfo.
Toxicology results will likely take several week, she said.
