OPIOID TRAGEDY AT COLUMBIA
“He had this list of the best colleges in the US and his goal was to get as high on the list as possible,” said Kyle, 57. “When he really set his mind to something, he’d stop at nothing to achieve it.”
Gage also liked to push boundaries. By his junior year of high school, he was regularly experimenting with drugs and alcohol. He threw big parties when his parents left town, left school during lunch to smoke weed inn his basement with pals and gotot into fights, said his friend Willll Rabsey.
“Cocaine was really big foror him,” said Rabsey, 19, who went to all 12 years of elementary, middlele and high school with Gage. “I re-emember a few times he’d put aa line out and I’d say, ‘ Damn, Gage,e, done that’s this a lot.’ before. He’d I say, can ‘ No, handle no ve” it.’ I’ve ”
After high school, Gage at-tended Bates College in Maine. Bates is highly ranked, but it wasn’t good enough for Gage, and he transferred to Columbia.
“You see, dad? Now all of us in the family went to the Ivy League!” Gage chirped.
But his dad sensed something was wrong. When he picked up Gage at Bates at the end of the school year in May 2017, he noticed his son had wrapped his dorm room smoke detector in plastic.
“I said, ‘You’re crazy, what are you doing, smoking pot in here?’ ” said Glenn. “That’s how the sum- mer kicked off.” As the weeks went by, Gage’s parents saw a big shift in his behavior. They found dozens of beer cans in their basement. Gage openly smoked weed inside and his temper worsened. “Whenever I’d try to talk to him about drugs, he’d get really upset and wouldn’t talk to me for days,” Glenn recalled. He often told his parents to “f--k off ” and slammed his bedroom door. Rabsey thinks Gage felt untouchable after getting into Columbia. “He told me hhe was so happy he got in that he was just going kind of buck wild last summer . . . He was often taking something,” he said. Gage llied to his psychiatrist to up his prescription of Klonopin, an anti-anxiietyety pill. He’d also been prescribed Vyvanse, a stimulant, and Methylphenidate — commonly known as Ritalin — to treat Attention Deficit Disorder.
On Aug. 28, Gage moved into his dorm at the Carlton Arms on Riverside Drive. He planned to study economics. At first, he seemed normal to his 12 suitemates. But drugs quickly consumed his life.
“He got worse and worse and his health completely deteriorated,” said Miguel Moya, who lived with Gage. He lost weight, and seemed to live on ice cream sandwiches and Coca-Cola.
On Dec. 27, the Bellittos reported Gage as a missing person to Columbia security. “It didn’t even cross my mind that he was dead or even injured,” said Kyle.
“It was way worse than we had ever imagined,” Glenn added. “It often isn’t what you see that’s deadly. It’s what you don’t see.”