If Not For Steroids: `Pills Killed Our Son' -- Parents Believe Deadly Pills Led To Son's Suicide

PHILADELPHIA - It had been a rough 24 hours.

On the night of April 13, Timmy Issel argued with his fiancee, Nicole Ferretti, began drinking beer, then was arrested by police in Lower Gwynedd Township after firing one shot through his dormitory window at Gwynedd-Mercy College.

While spending the night in jail, Issel, 21, a former basketball player at Father Judge High School in Philadelphia and Gwynedd-Mercy, received word from a college official that he had been suspended from school and banned from campus for the horseplay that had gone too far.

The next afternoon, Timmy's fiancee and his 23-year-old sister, Michele, posted 10 percent of the $10,000 bail and took him home. Michele drove Timmy because Nicole, quite honestly, was too angry to be with him.

Once back at home in northeastern Philadelphia, Timmy began drinking, mixing beer with heavy thought. The result was torment.

He was sure that Nicole, though she tried her best to convince him otherwise once she joined Timmy at the house, was about to end their engagement.

He was sure that Gwynedd-Mercy was about to expel him.

He was sure that his parents, Tim and Joanne, who were away on a business-pleasure trip in Florida, would be livid about the gun purchase and the incident at the school. Overall he'd had a great relationship with his parents, but he had disappointed them before. He had fathered a son, Nicholas, now 11 months, with Nicole, and another son, Timmy, now 3 1/2, with another girl while in high school.

In short, he felt the four walls closing in.

Nicole left the house around 6 p.m. and Michele went out for the night. Timmy stretched out on a living-room sofa, flicked on the television and continued pounding down beer. His younger brother, Brian, 19, was upstairs doing schoolwork.

Around 10 p.m., while talking on the phone with Nicole and alternately sobbing and flaring, Timmy Issel shot himself to death with a gun belonging to his father.

His final words, said over the phone to his fiancee: "I'm done."

In the five months since Timothy Michael Issel took his life at the age of 21, his parents have struggled to understand why.

Yes, they knew their son had been hit with a number of serious jolts in a short period of time. Yes, they knew he had been drinking heavily on the afternoon and night of his death, and the toxicology tests later would confirm that. They showed his blood-alcohol level to be 0.16, Tim Issel said, well above Pennsylvania's legal limit of 0.10.

Nevertheless, Tim and Joanne Issel were convinced that Timmy never would have taken his life had something else not been involved.

They have come to believe, despite the lack of any conclusive medical insight, that it was steroids.

The Issels learned from neighborhood buddies of Timmy's and from his college roommate, Greg Small, that their son had been taking steroids orally for close to a year. They also were told he had increased his usage to dangerous levels after quitting the basketball team a few games into last season.

"If not for steroids, Timmy would still be with us," Tim Issel said flatly. "He never would have changed. He never would have been pushed (to suicide)."

Because they are so sure that steroid use caused Timmy's death, the Issels have decided to tell their story. Until recently, when Tim and Joanne Issel, both 45, spent more than two hours speaking about their son, occasionally through misty eyes, they had opened up only to family members, their pastor at St. Bernard Church, the Rev. Charles Sullivan, and one close friend.

"We're private people," Issel said when asked if he and his wife ever could picture themselves speaking to students in a packed auditorium about the danger of steroids and what happened to Timmy. "We're not big talkers, either. But we do want to bring this out. We figured this would be a good way. Maybe some kids will read it. Maybe they'll stay away from steroids. If they're already on them, maybe they'll get off. Maybe this will tip off parents what to look for.

"Even helping one kid, that would be worth it."

Ferretti and Small also were eager to talk.

"This sounds like a good show for `Oprah,' " Ferretti said. "It seems like people don't know enough about what steroids can do."

Added Small: "I'm glad this is coming out. People should know."

One of the first things Greg Small did after Timmy Issel's death was to ask his mother, Joyce, a registered nurse, for some literature on steroids.

Mindful that his friend's behavior had undergone dramatic change, Small wanted information on side effects.

When everything he read seemed to click - emotional changes are a common feature of steroid abusers and Timmy had been displaying many of the classic signs - he approached the Issels three days after their son's death, one day before the viewing.

"I figured I HAD to tell them," he said. "Anyone would want answers."

Small was the one who told the Issels their son had been using steroids since the start of his final school year. Similar input came from Ferretti, who told the Issels she had seen a bottle marked "steroids" in one of Timmy's bags while helping him move into his dorm room.

"I never said anything to him," Ferretti said. "I didn't want him to think that I'd been snooping around in his stuff."

Armed with the information from Small and Ferretti, Issel's father talked to his son's neighborhood buddies and found out still more. He learned, for example, that Timmy's steroid use had begun that summer, when he had joined a local gym.

From the neighborhood buddies, Tim Issel also learned that his son had had a brief fling with steroids as a ninth-grader.

"The friend said it was one of those things where other kids were talking about them and taking them," said Issel. "He said it stopped real quick, that Timmy decided against it. If I'd known, I would have bit his head off.

"Timmy did have a fascination with muscles, but I'm confident he didn't use steroids again (until the summer of 1993).

"He did a paper for school on the dangers of steroids. We found it when we went through some of his things (after his death). But you know what? The focus was on the PHYSICAL side effects, not the psychological.

"Timmy was very much against drugs. He did a little drinking - all kids do - and he did do more toward the end (studies have found that those on steroids often drink excessively). But I think it was the effect of the steroids, the depression they put him in. But drugs? No way. One of his friends told me a story about Timmy being at a party when somebody pulled out cocaine. Timmy slapped the stuff out of the guy's hands. It went all over the floor. Timmy told the guy if he ever brought that junk out around him again, he would kick the bleep out of him.

"His biggest hero, probably, was (Philadelphia Eagles running back) Herschel Walker, even back to his days with the New Jersey Generals (of the United States Football League). He admired how strong Herschel was, that he'd done it the natural way. Pushups and situps. Pushups and situps."

Timmy Issel was 6 feet, 180 pounds, when he died. His parents, fiancee and roommate can't recall that he looked any bigger than normal in the final year of his life. Neither did he show, all of them said, such classic, visible symptoms of steroid use as pimples, a body rash or thinning hair.

But he did become withdrawn, short-tempered, combative. And all are classic indicators of steroids, according to Dr. Harrison Pope, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and the leading expert on the behavorial effects of steroids.

"At least one-third of steroid users, kids and adults, experience prominent psychiatric effects," Pope said in the February 1992 issue of Gentlemen's Quarterly, in an article about steroid abuse by teen-agers in Bayonne, N.J.

Pope said in the piece that he had heard countless stories of male steroid abusers displaying quick flashes of temper, often leading to aggressive acts against other males or destruction of property. He added that the second most common feature of male steroid abuse was anger against women, expressed both physically and verbally.

Issel's parents were slow to see the changes in their son because he was not around as much when school was in session. Ferretti and Small saw them often.

"One time I was at the Issels' - his mom and dad were out - and Brian (Timmy's 19-year-old brother) came down the steps wearing one of Tim's jackets," Ferretti said. "Tim went into a rage. He ran toward Brian and tried to punch him. He hit the wall. We asked him, `Why'd you do that?' He said he didn't know."

The Timmy Issel his mother remembers before the changes took hold was a sweet, sensitive, outgoing kid.

"So many people told us that it always made their day to see Timmy," she said. "If you could have seen him. ... In the summer, he would walk up our block and say hi to every single person.

"He always liked laughing. We'd go to the movies and he'd laugh so loud, I'd almost have to get away from him."

She smiled. "It would be like, `I don't know this goofball,"' she said.

Nicole Ferretti has an entirely different set of memories. She remembers, for example, what happened with the punching bag Timmy received for his 21st birthday last Jan. 21.

"Because my basement was a little bigger," Ferretti said, "we decided to put it at my house. Sometimes we'd be talking in the kitchen and the least little thing would set him off. He'd go nuts. He'd run down the steps and start whacking that bag. WHACKING it. I'd yell down, `Where's all that anger coming from?' It scared me."

Was Issel ever physically abusive to her?

"He pushed me a few times," Ferretti said. "Not into a wall. Not down steps. I don't want to make it sound worse than it was. He never hit me. Just shoved me a little, let's say."

Added Small: "Something would happen and Tim would just LOSE it. Start kicking the door. I'd think, `Wow, what's causing this?"'

No one who knew Timmy Issel has a definitive answer on why Timmy Issel thought he needed steroids. There are only theories.

"He was strong," his father said. "He was already built. There was no reason."

"Maybe he did it for the same reason women have face lifts," his mother said. "The women look good, but they think they don't."

"After he quit basketball," Small said, "he talked about getting back into tae kwon do (in which he had earned a black belt in high school). Maybe he thought he needed to get bigger for that."

Timmy Issel loved basketball through his sophomore year at Gwynedd-Mercy, in which he won one of the weekly Sam Cozen Awards given to small-college players. He was frustrated that the team was short on height, but he never backed down from taller opponents and actually seemed to enjoy bumping bodies with the big guys. He played every position but center.

But he soured on playing for Gwynedd-Mercy last December and abruptly quit the team.

"Greg was so mad at Timmy," Joanne Issel said. "He didn't talk to him for two weeks."

Small now is a senior at Gwynedd-Mercy. The administration granted his request to move into a single room in a different dormitory after Issel's death.

"I didn't want to have another best friend," he said. "I didn't want to get close to someone else."

Small said he thinks "every day" about what happened to Issel and second-guesses himself "all the time" for not having tried to intervene, especially after his roommate's steroid use worsened.

And it did worsen, according to Small. He said Issel was taking one tablet every other day until he quit the basketball team.

"Then he was taking one a day, sometimes two," Small said. "He'd get up, get a tablet and take it, like it was vitamin C.

"That's the way he looked at it, like he was taking vitamins. He didn't think of it as that big a deal. I was pretty naive about steroids. I can see now that Tim was in over his head. Back then, I guess I let myself be convinced that Tim knew what he was doing, that he could handle it."

Indeed, for a while, he could. Through his almost three years at Gwynedd-Mercy, Issel did well academically.

"He made the Dean's List his first semester there and never had less than a B average," his father said. "He did better than he'd done (in high school). He had a C average there. We were proud of him. It was like, `Our Timmy? Doing this?' It was great.

"He talked about doubling up on summer courses this summer so he could graduate this December. He was going to take the courses at Holy Family, where his brother goes. He was checking with the Gwynedd-Mercy people to make sure he could work it all out. He wanted to get done, get a job, settle down with Nicole."

Tim Issel shook his head and bit his lip as he remebered getting the call in Florida that his son had committed suicide.

"You can't believe the shock, the grief, the devastation," he said. "To lose your son, especially that way. Through the wake, funeral, everything, we didn't sleep, didn't eat. We were going around here in mumble mode."

Five months later, the past tense remains an uncomfortable fit for Tim Issel when he talks about his son. He can't believe he's using words such as "was" and "had" and "used to be."

"They still don't sound right coming out of my mouth," Issel said. "Not about Timmy."

Small echoed those thoughts.

"Any suicide is tough to understand," he said. "The hardest thing to grasp is that we'll never know the answer. After it happened I'd tell myself, `I should have picked up on so many things.' ... Tough."

Before taking his life, Timmy Issel made special efforts to express love to his sister and brother. He also wrote a note to his parents and placed it on the coffee table next to the sofa.

"He talked about fighting demons," his father said. "He said he was sorry for the pain he caused us. The note was laden with God, love, sorrow ..."

Timmy directed the postscript to his sister, who would become Mrs. Michele Zitter on June 11 and move into a house a few blocks away. Timmy would have been an usher.

"I'm sorry for ruining the happiest day of your life," he wrote. "But this is the worst day of my life."