LUTHMANN NOTE: This case is not complicated. A child came out as gay and was allegedly met with a gun. The system’s job was to protect him. Instead, it protected power. When Mathias Alvarez ran for his life, the state didn’t shield him — it turned its weapons on the man who helped him. That is not justice. That is DARVO with a badge and a docket number. False reports. Weaponized DCF. A retaliatory restraining order. This is how abusers flip the script. If Connecticut cannot protect a terrified teen from alleged gun violence in his own home, then every family should be afraid. This piece is “Gun To His Son’s Head.”
By Richard Luthmann
A Coming-Out Met with a Gun and Silence
(Fairfield County, Connecticut) – Seventeen-year-old Mathias Alvarez did the bravest thing a gay teen can do: he came out to his parents. The response was sheer terror. His father, Carlos Alvarez, allegedly pulled a handgun and pressed it to his son’s head, snarling a death threat: “If you’re gay, I’m gonna shoot you,” leaving Mathias shaking in fear.
This was no idle threat – the boy later showed bruises and begged school counselors for help. The abuse was blatant, yet despite multiple disclosures, no meaningful law-enforcement action was taken against Carlos Alvarez, raising serious concerns about systemic failure or improper influence.
As one frustrated witness put it, “Mathias has told numerous… people about the abuse… [but] no one’s listening to him.”
Carlos and Zoali Alvarez are not fringe figures in New Canaan. They are wealthy, well-connected builders, the owners of GreenDay Co., a luxury homebuilding and design firm that markets itself to Fairfield County’s elite. Their business footprint, high-dollar projects, and local embeddedness matter here because in Connecticut, power changes outcomes.
Here are some of the New Canaan, Connecticut, homes they’ve built and sold:
Despite repeated disclosures of alleged violence, including a reported gun threat against their own son, no immediate police action followed.
By contrast, when the Alvarezes accused others, police responses were swift and aggressive. That imbalance has fueled growing concern that the Alvarezes enjoy preferential treatment—whether through relationships, reputation, or pressure—creating the appearance that law enforcement bent toward their narrative while ignoring far more serious allegations against them.
Instead of protecting Mathias, authorities left him in the line of fire. In the weeks after the October 2025 gun incident, Carlos and his wife Zoali allegedly tried to “pray the gay away.”
They blamed Mathias’s school for “influencing” his sexuality and shipped him off to a religious counselor to make him straight.
In a fit of vengeful zeal, they even attempted to have Mathias’s 18-year-old boyfriend prosecuted on a bogus statutory rape charge – a baseless ploy that police ultimately threw out. With home turned into a hellscape of homophobia and coercion, Mathias finally fled for his life.
He found refuge with family friends – the Weigel family – who understood the danger he was in. Connecticut’s child protection agency (DCF) initially allowed Mathias to stay with the Weigels for his safety after interviewing him, during which the teen explicitly said he felt safest away from his parents.
But incredibly, DCF soon handed Mathias back to Carlos and Zoali under “monitoring,” essentially returning the teen to the very people who allegedly threatened to kill him for being gay.
Mathias remains in his parents’ custody to this day, a fact that raises the question: How could every system meant to protect a child so utterly fail him?
Gun To His Son’s Head: Whistleblower Flipped Into “Villain” by Lawfare
The moment Mathias found sanctuary with David Weigel’s family, the Alvarezes launched a DARVO blitz – Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. They dialed 911 and falsely accused the Weigels of “kidnapping” their son, trying to paint Mathias’s rescuers as abductors.
Police and DCF swarmed the Weigel home in force, triggering an armed confrontation that terrified everyone inside. After investigation, authorities found zero evidence of wrongdoing by Weigel or his family – every claim was unsubstantiated.
But instead of facing consequences for the false reports, the Alvarezes doubled down.
When the “kidnapping” narrative failed, Carlos and Zoali turned to the courts. In December, they obtained an ex parte temporary restraining order (TRO) against Weigel (without him present) based on a months-old incident police had declined to pursue. The timing and flimsy grounds betray the order’s true purpose: to muzzle Weigel and recast him as the menace.
Just weeks later, in a final act of CYA lawfare, New Canaan police belatedly hit Weigel with a misdemeanor “assault” summons over the same January 15 incident – even though no arrest was made at the time. The delayed charge “suggests strategic pressure rather than neutral law enforcement action,” one analysis noted.
Weigel blasted the moves as “politically motivated and influenced by Carlos Alvarez’s local connections,” not any new evidence.
The civil TROs were signed by Senior Judge Robert L. Genuario of the Stamford/Norwalk District Superior Court. Carlos and Zoali Alvarez’s sworn TRO affidavits read like a Hollywood horror script, but they don’t match the record, and they inflate routine dispute facts into “sexual abuse / sexual assault/stalking” labels to trigger emergency relief.
Carlos swears Weigel “threatened” them on Oct. 22, 2025, and then claims a Jan. 15, 2026 visit ended with Weigel “assault[ing]” Zoali, “slapp[ing] her in her face,” “grab[bing] and chok[ing] her,” and “kick[ing] her” — followed by “David was arrested and left.”
Zoali repeats the same story, under oath, and adds that she’s “scared” Weigel will keep attacking and will keep posting about them online.
But these affidavits also reveal the exaggeration. The New Canaan Police Department and Connecticut court records show that Weigel was never taken into custody and given the equivalent of a “Desk Appearance Ticket.”
The “stalking/sexual assault” framing is stapled onto text messages, insults, and online commentary, plus a single doorstep confrontation that was not treated as the kind of immediate, ongoing predatory threat their checked boxes imply.
In addition, Carlos’s account of the Jan. 15, 2026, visit is that Weigel assaulted Zoali, slapping her in her face, grabbing her, choking her, and kicking her. Carlos’s only response was that he called the police, and then “David was arrested and left.”
“It doesn’t make sense that any husband, let alone a builder, a construction guy, would stand idly by while his wife was assaulted, slapped, grabbed, choked, and kicked,” said a local Westport, Connecticut, criminal attorney who did not wishto be named. “It further defies logic that after all those things happened to his wife, he just let her stand around and wait for the cops to come, and they didn’t get out of there and tend to what would have been serious injuries, if they had happened.”
The Alvarezes also bury the central context — the teen safety crisis — while pushing a narrative designed to cast Weigel as a violent “predator” and themselves as helpless victims, even though the broader chronology shows their complaints repeatedly failed to substantiate wrongdoing and instead functioned as retaliation.
“Did I send some salty text messages. Sure. I told Carlos – ‘Now repeat after me, I have a gay son, and it’s OK,’ ” Weigel said. “What is not part of the Alvarezes’ bogus record is the fact that Carlos Alvarez, a grown man, physically threatened my teenage daughter. Over my dead body.”
It’s a textbook flip-the-script. The alleged abusers have cast themselves as victims and the rescuer as the villain.
In reality, the facts point to a coordinated campaign of intimidation, false reporting, and legal ‘lawfare’ designed to silence a whistleblower and deflect scrutiny from the Alvarezes’ own conduct.
The very systems meant to protect Mathias – police, DCF, the courts – were weaponized to punish the Good Samaritan who tried to save him.
This is DARVO in action: attack as the best defense.
Gun To His Son’s Head: Smear Campaign and the Stench of Corruption
Enter Jason and Erin Samaritano, a New Jersey couple known for harassment. Jason Samaritano literally has a rap sheet a mile long. They have become the Alvarezes’ online attack dogs.
The Alvarezes themselves remain publicly silent, letting the Samaritanos wage war online for them, bombarding social media with lies and vitriol against David Weigel.
They smeared Weigel as a “child groomer” and even claimed he “beat up” Mathias’s mother – a bogus accusation with zero proof. In one chilling Facebook rant, Jason Samaritano went so far as to warn, “This is why some houses burn down!”, a post widely seen as a thinly veiled call for violence against the Weigel family home.
“Erin and Jason Samaritano appear to be very sick people,” said Rick LaRivière, an independent journalist who previously covered the “Bonnie and Clyde” couple’s fake family court advocacy. “They are extremely jealous of Dave Weigel and the Family Court Fraud Warrior Project, as they’ve devoted countless hours, not to helping victims, but to developing a Facebook page that many believe will only serve as a roadmap for yet another prosecution.”
This coordinated smear campaign created a climate of fear and isolation around Weigel. The Alvarezes kept their hands clean in public while their proxies spread the dirt.
Yet scrutiny is now turning toward Carlos and Zoali themselves. They are well-heeled local figures. Observers note that discretionary decisions consistently favored their narrative, and the Alvarezes’ “community standing” may have “improperly swayed” officials who should have held them accountable.
FOIA requests are underway to uncover any backdoor influence at play. Where there’s big money in a small town, favoritism can fester – and this case has all the makings of a well-connected cover-up.
Gun To His Son’s Head: Spotlight on Mathias at Stamford
David Weigel isn’t cowering. The financial executive-turned-activist is fighting back on every front. On Monday morning (February 2, 2026), he will walk into the Stamford Superior Court not as a criminal, but as a crusader armed with truth.
At a 10:00 AM hearing, Weigel will move to quash the Alvarezes’ shaky restraining order and expose its lack of factual basis. Almost as important, outside that courthouse, cameras will be rolling.
The Family Court Fraud Warrior Project, an IRC 501(c)(3) recognized national watchdog and reform group founded by Weigel, has announced a major press conference on the courthouse steps immediately after the hearing.
Advocates are lining up to speak, determined to make sure Mathias’s story is heard loud and clear.
The message is simple: the world is watching.
Weigel knows the stakes. “This isn’t just my fight. It’s a fight for every parent, every child, and every family destroyed by this system,” he said in an earlier appeal, underscoring that what’s happening to Mathias could happen to anyone.
His ongoing advocacy has already shone a floodlight on family court corruption nationwide. Now, by rallying media attention in Stamford, he aims to force the hand of a system that thus far refused to protect a vulnerable teenager.
As pressure mounts, will Connecticut officials finally take action against the Alvarezes? Or will they continue to let a wealthy pair of alleged abusers weaponize police and courts to persecute the very man who saved their son’s life?
Mathias remains trapped with parents who allegedly vowed to kill him for who he is. Time is running out for someone in power to do the right thing.
The truth will be on display at Monday’s press conference – and a young life hangs in the balance.
