(L.A.) Leonard Rarick, 81, Died on the 5 Freeway
Case Number: 2022-06586
Los Angeles County is reporting the death of an 81-year-old Caucasian male that occurred on a highway in Castaic.
The coroner’s office has identified the man as Leonard Rarick, resident of El Penon Way in San Diego.
Manner of Death: Accident
Cause of Death: Blunt Head Trauma
RIP LEONARD D. RARICK (May 29, 1941 – June 25, 2022)
Formal pronouncement of death was made on Saturday at 10:00 a.m.
Incident Location:
Northbound 5 Freeway before Templin Hwy Ext 183, Castaic, CA 91384
For everyone who has ever wanted to leave life behind and start all over again with an entirely new identity, meet Dennis Rarick. Better yet, meet Leonard Cohn, The Sequel.
Rarick was 35, a prominent figure in mathematics and computer science, a brain who had presented his papers on linear computing to fellow scientists at The Hague.
But on a hot, humid day in August, 1976, mired in a personal black hole of depression, Rarick walked out of his Bethesda, Md., apartment. He left behind his wallet, his private papers, his car, and a cryptic note that his father remembers saying:
“I’m going on the kind of a trip where you never come back.”
The 14-year trip has come to an end in San Marcos, where Dennis Rarick turned Leonard Cohn has surfaced, alive and well and successful and now busily explaining to family and friends–and his wife for the last 10 years–how he ended one life and started another.
His father says he doesn’t want to ask too many questions. A brother says it figured Dennis would surface somewhere, somehow. His current wife is reconciling herself to finding out that her husband has a past, that he’s seven years older than the age on his driver’s license–and that she has a father-in-law.
Even the bureaucracy is catching up with Leonard Cohn–or Leonard Dennis Rarick, the name he plans to adopt.