‘He had it all’
Geoffrey Corbis was an alias he created in desperation in recent years. Before then, he was Geoffrey Weglarz, born in 1957, one of seven children raised in Florida. He grew up to embrace acting as a passion, performing in local plays and musicals with an intense energy.
In 2013, when the PBS program NewsHour visited Connecticut to do a story on older, unemployed Americans, the episode centered around an interview with Mr. Weglarz.
“I’ve applied for 481 jobs,” he said on the show. “None of them have panned out. They think that anybody over a certain age is going to be used up.”
He was nearing the bottom financially. “I’ve gone through my savings. I’ve gone through my 401(k). My unemployment last check is next week. I have about $2,000 to my name, and after that, I don’t know.”
In July or August, Mr. Weglarz — still the name most everyone knew him by — told his sister that he had obtained a vial of poison used for euthanasia. He had gotten it on the dark web, she said he told her.
“That way, when I’m ready, I can go painlessly and fast,” he told her, she said.
At 5:42 p.m., Mr. Weglarz sent his sister a final text, one that immediately reminded her of his obtaining poison weeks earlier.
It read, “Stuff does taste as bad as I thought it would.”
HE was divorced with shared custody of the child. The divorce settlement AND unemployment left him with meager savings and obligated him to pay alimony/child support too.
