Fotis Dulos has died.
On Tuesday, Dulos, 52, was rushed from his Farmington mansion, where he was on house arrest, to UConn Health, and then relocated to a New York City hospital for treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning following a suicide attempt in his garage.
Dulos, a professional builder who was born in Turkey and raised in Greece, was charged on Jan 8 in the murder and kidnapping of his estranged wife Jennifer Farber Dulos, who went missing on May 24 after dropping her children at school in New Canaan.
Police, who went to Dulos’ house in Farmington on Tuesday after he missed an emergency bond hearing in Stamford Superior Court, spotted him inside his garage in “medical distress.”
After emergency personnel performed CPR, and some media outlets reported he was dead, Dulos’ attorney Norm Pattis announced that his client had a pulse and was being transported by helicopter to UConn Health.
On Thursday, outside Jacobi Medical Center in Bronx, NY where Dulos had been in critical condition, Pattis announced that his client had been pronounced dead.
Pattis said despite Dulos’ death, his family hoped to clear his name.
“Fotis Dulos was declared dead tonight at 5:32pm,” Pattis said. “His family came in from Greece and decided today to donate his organs so that he will live on in some form in the assistance he can provide to others in their own individual struggles. The family is adamant that his name be cleared. As we are speaking, we have filed an unusual motion in the Connecticut courts asking to substitute an estate for Fotis Dulos for him as a defendant to force the State to show its hand in a trial filled with evidence we think that amounts to no more than innuendo and unsupported suspicion.”
Dulos may take to his grave the whereabouts of his estranged wife.
For months prior to filing for divorce on June 20, 2017, Jennifer Dulos said in an affidavit that Dulos, her husband of 13 years, had “exhibited irrational, unsafe, bullying, threatening and controlling behavior.”
The couple had five children together and were going through a difficult divorce when she moved to New Canaan in 2017.
In documents filed with state Superior Court as she sought an emergency order for custody of the couple’s five children, she said that her estranged husband’s behavior had “significantly intensified in the last three weeks and I am afraid for my safety,” as well as for her kids.
“I am afraid of my husband,” she said in an application for an emergency ex parte order of custody. “I know that filing for divorce, and filing this motion will enrage him. I know he will retaliate by trying to harm me in some way.”
According to a report in sister site NewCanaanite.com, Mr. Dulos denied his wife’s accusations in filing his objection to the custody application, saying that he “never physically threatened, stalked or assaulted” his wife, and never threatened to take the kids—though they had traveled to Greece together annually, as a family.
Rather, Fotis Dulos said, his wife took the kids and left the family’s home in Farmington for New Canaan without warning or notice just after Father’s Day, doing so on a pretext of visiting a gravesite, then immediately filed for divorce and custody, though she herself takes anti-psychotic and anti-anxiety medication that “renders her incapable of parenting.”
Also charged in relation to the death of Jennifer Dulos are his girlfriend Michelle Troconis, 44, and friend Connecticut attorney Kent Mawhinney, a 54-year-old Bloomfield attorney, who was not only a friend of Fotis Dulos, but also had worked as the first lawyer to represent him in defense of civil suit brought by Jennifer Dulos’s mother, Gloria Farber, claiming Fotis Dulos owed her family $2.5 million in loans.
It remains unclear whether Fotis Dulos left a suicide note.