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Tim Fresch, a 22-year-old Miami University student, died on April 13, 2016 after being discovered unconscious at his off-campus house on April 9. The Oxford Police Department (OPD) is still waiting for the coroner’s report on the cause of the death, but it appears that he choked on his own vomit. In short: drugs and alcohol most likely played a role in his untimely death.
“We don’t know for sure what he ingested, but we’ve seen [cocaine] this year,” said OPD’s Sergeant Jon Varley. “Oxford has seen an increase in drug use, especially hard drugs such as heroin and, this year, powder cocaine,” Varley said.
Despite what may have led to the student’s death, his passing is a tragedy and should be treated as such. Unfortunately writers at The Miami Student thought differently.
A memorial article was recently published in the school paper that was so disrespectful it sparked major outrage among the Miami community. Several readers called the piece “insensitive” and “disgusting,” and they weren’t far off. The article focused almost exclusively on the Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat brother’s hard-partying ways, and attributed his death to the inevitable consequence of the dark side of college life.
One of Fresch’s friends, Joe Ostrander, a junior at Miami, remembers meeting Fresch through mutual friends at Pachinko Bar and Grill.
“He was the funniest and nicest dude you’ll ever meet,” said Ostrander. “He was like ‘Wazzup dude! My name’s Timmy!’ That’s literally the first thing he ever said to me. He did not stop smiling the entire night.”
After that first night, they became instant friends.
One weekend, two of Ostrander’s friends came to visit Miami. Ostrander said Timmy made it his personal mission to get the two visitors completely hammered.
“He was like, ‘Dude, I’m gonna make your friends black the fuck out!’” Ostrander said. “I was like, ‘Oh, all right. Let’s do it!’”
Timmy succeeded in his mission and got one of Ostrander’s friends to blackout. Ostrander said his friend just fell over on the floor, passed out and started snoring. Timmy decided to get an airhorn, the kind that people commonly use at athletic events, and started blaring it into the guy’s ear. He didn’t budge and continued snoring. Timmy and the rest of the guys there thought it was the funniest thing ever.
“I work at Pachinkos, and I created two drinks just for Timmy,” said Ostrander. “I had to make the most disgusting, boozy concoctions just because he wanted me to make him something stupid.”
Fresch walked into Ostrander’s first shift at the bar and waited for him to make him that ‘something stupid.’ Ostrander started Fresch’s drink with a liquid cocaine shot which is Goldschlager, Jägermeister, and Bacardi 151.
“I basically made a drink with a shot and a half of liquid cocaine, gin, vodka and tequila,” said Ostrander. “It pretty much fucks you up, and then I top that off with Red Bull and Coke. It’s absolutely disgusting, but he loved it.”
Ostrander calls that concoction “The Fresch” and another “Timmy of the Beach,” which Ostrander said is much better tasting.
“He loved to have a good time, but he had his demons. I’ll put it that way,” Ostrander said. “The problem is, a lot of times the people who seem the happiest often have a lot of internal struggles. Look at Robin Williams. He was one of the happiest people in Hollywood, one of the most famously funny people, but he had a lot of demons like my buddy.”
Ostrander said Timmy seemed to be dealing with those demons better than before. He took a little time off to get better and seemed happy to be back. He loved being at Miami with all of his friends.
“It was just a little too much of everything. A little too much can be a bad thing,” said Ostrander. “He just went a little too far, but we need to remember him as the great person that he was.”
DiMichele [Fresch’s friend since boarding school] never saw Fresch’s death coming, but he acknowledged that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility either.
“He was in a friend group of young, smart kids who lived together, and it was all over consumption and pushing your limits,” DiMichele said about their time at boarding school. “I suppose that most of us grew out of that, but he did not.”
DiMichele said it’s a habit that becomes routine. He got down a path that he couldn’t reverse.
“There’s just so much stigma around a lifestyle like that, and kids won’t reach out because they think that there isn’t new information and new help out there, but there is,” said DiMichele. “Mental health is gaining a lot of traction now. We really just need to get the information to those people. When you really do finally know the facts, it becomes that much easier.”
After receiving hundreds of angry comments, two professors overseeing the newspaper defended the article:
Honest reporting on this crisis calls us all to ask — faculty who cancel classes on Green Beer Day; a Greek system that seems incapable of self-regulation; parents who ignore early signs of alcohol abuse or mental illness; alumni who hear of rampant drinking and drugs and think: “Well, it’s college; I did that”; and especially students who cheer when friends drink or dose themselves toward oblivion.
What we hope is that amid the outrage, much of it sanctimonious, over a newspaper story, a few students will read that story and think: “That might have been me.”
We hope, too, that The Student’s story will spur our own community to refocus on this national crisis, rather than simply to mourn the loss of Timothy Fresch and move on.
I’m speechless. In his 22 years of life, I’m sure there are other things to highlight other than black-out drinking. And if you’re going to make a point about college drinking and drug use, then do some research and cite other examples, don’t single one guy out. This is not a memorial, this is a lecture. And not even a good one, at that.
[H/T: TFM]
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