“When a parent loses a child there is no greater pain … This agonizing loss will be felt for the rest of our lives,” Sylvester Stallone has said. “Sage is our first child and the center of our universe, and I am humbly begging for all to have my son’s memory and soul left in peace.” He wore sunglasses throughout the service to shield his eyes, but was clearly devastated.
He was hoping to downplay the media attention on what cost his son’s life. Friends say that Sage could become depressed now and then but was not suicidal and had recently made plans with his friends and girlfriend. The friend and family lawyer said that Sage was “Not depressed,” and had marriage plans.
A friend who knew him better, Stephen Wozniak, also thinks he had no plans for suicide, noting that though “He would have withdrawal and get depressed” as reported to E! News, he would try other ways to remedy himself. “He would try to overcompensate. He would try to clown around and I know that those are things that people do, medicate or wake up. He was no different. Very few people were telling him, ‘Don’t do that.’ I did. I was very resistant when you would tell him that. It was a sore point with him.”
Perhaps the most controversial part of Sage’s death is the discovery of 60 enormous empty prescription bottles for Hydrocodone tables (vicodin), leading authorities to suspect he was a dealer. His weight, appearance, and demeanor suggest that he was not an addict himself — at 188 lbs standing 5’7″ he was not as skinny as most addicts are — yet the vicodin might have played a role in his death, as bags of powder, suspected to be that drug, were found in his room.
His mother has a different interpretation of the events. She had tried to dissuade her son from having multiple procedures done to his mouth, but after extensive dental work, he was on pain pills, which she believed he accidentally overdosed on. Mothers always suspect the best in such matters, but most everybody involved feels confident the death was an accident.