After a while, his parents began visiting occasionally. In 1985, when Val was 9, Alla, who had remarried and moved to New Jersey, was granted custody and her new husband, William Broeksmit, adopted Val. (Alla Broeksmit declined to comment on her son’s death.)
Val was expelled from the Dublin School in New Hampshire for various infractions when he was 13, but he managed to get through Rocky Mountain Academy, a school for troubled teenagers in northern Idaho, and graduated from Albright College in Reading, Pa., in 1999.
He moved to New York, where he took courses in film and television production.
In addition to his mother, his survivors include two stepsisters, Alessa and Katarina, from his mother’s second marriage.
For five years, Mr. Broeksmit dangled the documents he had found through his stepfather’s emails. An article that Mr. Enrich wrote about flaws in Deutsche Bank’s financial reporting for The Wall Street Journal in 2014, before he joined The Times, prompted a drop of three percentage points in the bank’s share price, depressing its market value by more than $1 billion.
The investigations into the bank are continuing. It has already agreed to pay millions in fines for violating accounting controls and concealing corrupt payments.
While whistle-blowers are often dismissed as “selfish, damaged, reckless and crazy,” Mr. Enrich later wrote in The Times, “all of them, regardless of motivation, used secret documents to change the course of history.”
