Metro

Heartbreaking twist in Koppel tragedy

Andrew Koppel (Via Facebook)

The son of legendary TV newsman Ted Koppel had the unconditional love of his parents and a second child on the way — but the twin demons of drugs and booze were a deadly lure he couldn’t duck, friends said yesterday.

Andrew “Drew” Koppel, 40, had “many substance-abuse issues,” said a longtime family friend.

Still, that friend found it “shocking” that Koppel died in a stranger’s seedy Manhattan apartment Monday after nearly 12 hours of drinking whiskey with a man he had just met in a Hell’s Kitchen bar.

“What’s really puzzling the family is why he ended up where he did,” said another family friend. “It was a Sunday and holiday weekend. Why was he drinking in Hell’s Kitchen and why would he end up in Washington Heights?”

Friends noted that Andrew — a former Legal Aid attorney who quit his longtime job as a city Housing Authority lawyer in 2008 — was close to his famous dad and the rest of his family, and never found his drinking to be a cause for alarm.

Ted Koppel, who pioneered ABC’s “Nightline,” and his wife, Grace Anne, were in New York yesterday arranging to have Andrew’s body sent to a funeral parlor near their home in Potomac, Md.

“Our son, Andrew, was a brilliant, caring man, whose loss we will mourn for the rest of our lives,” the family said in a statement.

Andrew Koppel, his photographer girlfriend, Ilona Lieberman, and their beautiful toddler, Alice, had been living with Lieberman’s parents in the Rockaways until recently.

On her Web site, Lieberman, who was visibly pregnant yesterday, has several photos showing her with a beaming Andrew and Alice on a beach. There are also pictures of Ted Koppel with the family.

Neighbors said they never saw Andrew drunk around the house, but a man who met him in the Harbor Light bar in Rockaway Park last year recalled his dark side.

“He was out of his mind. He was drunk,” said the man, adding that the younger Koppel drove to the bar on his own BMW motorcycle.

“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” and drunkenly drove off, recalled the man.

“He was well beyond his limit.”

Andrew reportedly spent Sunday guzzling whiskey with waiter Russell Wimberly, 32, in a series of Hell’s Kitchen saloons.

Wimberly later brought the extremely intoxicated Andrew to the Washington Heights apartment of a friend, Belinda Caban, 53. She said yesterday that Andrew appeared to be more than just drunk.

“I think he did take [drugs] because he was too out of it,” said Caban, who helped put the drunk man in a bedroom to sleep it off.

Several hours later, seeing he wasn’t breathing they called 911, but it was too late.

“Tell his father I am very sorry,” Caban said yesterday. “I apologize that this happened to him. I was just a person who was trying to help.”

Additional reporting by Douglas Montero, John Doyle and Jamie Schram

jeane.macintosh@nypost.com