Mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio’s estranged father, a World War II hero whose life careened out of control because of alcohol, took his own life after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, public records reveal.
On a July morning in 1979, Warren Wilhelm, 61, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a parked car outside the Rocky River Motel in New Milford, Conn.
Wilhelm, who lived in New Haven after divorcing de Blasio’s mother, Maria, in Massachusetts a decade earlier, was suffering from late-stage cancer, public records show.
“The local police received a call at 8:24 a.m. from a subject stating that he or she had found a man dead in vehicle,” reads an Aug. 2, 1979, article in the New Milford Times.
“The police said their investigation revealed that the wound had been self-inflicted with a rifle.”
De Blasio, who uses his mom’s surname, had never discussed the death until Monday.
He declined The Post’s request to talk about his relationship with his father, who left the family home in Cambridge when de Blasio was just 7 and who died when de Blasio was 18.
But the Democratic mayoral nominee opened up to WNYC radio in what he said would be his only interview on the topic.
“It was an unbelievable, incredibly difficult moment in life,” de Blasio said. “We all thought we would be saying goodbye in some more traditional way, and suddenly he was gone. But he was gone in such difficult circumstances over the course of years and years.”
De Blasio said that his father’s cancer was caused by heavy cigarette smoking and that he had been drunk “pretty much every day” after leaving the family.
“Sometimes, I would spend time with him earlier in the day when he was a little less drunk, and you could have more of a conversation,” said de Blasio, who has two older brothers. “He was very difficult to be around . . . and so it became less and less frequent.”
De Blasio told WNYC that his daughter, Chiara, 18, knew of her grandfather’s suicide but that he told his 16-year-old son, Dante, about it only on Monday.
DeBlasio said the suicide was the culmination of a long downward spiral.
“It has to be understood against the backdrop of years and years of things just getting worse and worse. On the one hand, it was a shock. On the other hand, it wasn’t a shock at all,” he said.
His father was cremated, he told WNYC, and his ashes spread over a part of Long Island Sound, where he used to sail.
Wilhelm, a Yale grad, had lost part of his leg in the Battle of Okinawa and worked as an economist and then freelance writer.
De Blasio said he had never revealed the details of his death because it was too traumatic.
“It’s just very painful because it’s all the result of this horrible decline he went through. Talking about it obviously brings up what that whole, long painful period was like, but particularly the last year of his life,” he said.
“It was clear he didn’t have much time left. He didn’t give any indication that this is what he would choose to do, but we all knew the end was near one way or another.”
De Blasio’s closeness to his mother’s side eventually led him to change his birth name — Warren Wilhelm Jr. — first to Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm, then to Bill de Blasio.
His mom, Maria de Blasio, an author, died in 2007 after having lived down the block from de Blasio and his family in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for years.