Seeking Relief, McHale's Life Took a Fatal Turn

"Well, yeah, I have a new wife and a kid," Gatons said, somewhat confused. "Everything's fine."

McHale didn't respond.

Later, the two men stopped in front of a house near McHale's residence. McHale told Gatons that the former occupant was involved in a serious car accident and became addicted to pain medication upon recovery. McHale said the man later committed suicide. Gatons considered the dialogue odd.

"It added to the whole 'he's unhappy' feeling," Gatons said. "He's pointing out this house, and he's telling me this story for a reason, now that I look back on it.

"I wanted to believe everything was fine with him. I didn't want to hear the bad news. I figured Tom was always strong enough and smart enough, I thought, that he wouldn't be stupid. I chose to put my head in the sand and believe in the power of Tom. I believed he was strong enough and intelligent enough to beat it, whatever it was he was going through. I let him down."

Moholt, McHale's friend since second grade, said that five years ago, McHale flew from Florida to Maryland to help Moholt beat his own drug and alcohol problem. After that experience, they continued to correspond. But a year ago, Moholt said, McHale stopped returning his phone calls.

McHale was one of five members of a Christian accountability group that met once a week at a Tampa restaurant. They discussed their lives as husbands, as fathers and as men of God. They trusted one another. Some shared insights not normally discussed among friends, such as admitting to losing their temper in front of their wives.

In April 2007, McHale began skipping their meetings. By that point, the depression brought on by his oxycodone abuse had led McHale to experiment with cocaine, Margy said.

Before long, members of his Christian group grew curious about his condition.

"His frequency of meeting with us was less and less, and I was starting to get concerned," said Chris Marino, a member of the group who knew McHale since the fourth grade and moved to Tampa to work with McHale in real estate.

"We could tell if he was overmedicated, let's just say. We tried to confront him a few times. Eventually you would get denial, but then you would get: 'Oh yeah, you're right. I have this struggle.' "

Another member of the group was Rob Taylor, a Tampa Bay Buccaneers tackle from 1986 to 1993. "We would question him about certain things, and to be honest with you, I don't know if he was telling us the whole truth," Taylor said. "I think he was trying to hide some of that at one time. It came out from his wife that he was having deeper troubles than we ever knew.