Reports suggest fake firefighter suspect mentally ill

Defense lawyers for a writer accused of posing as a firefighter and sexually abusing a woman on Halloween night filed two reports Thursday suggesting that the defendant is a mentally ill schizophrenic.

One of Peter Braunstein’s lawyers, Robert Gottlieb, had to submit the reports after notifying the court in May that his client would offer a psychiatric defense. He says Braunstein “had a substantial incapacity to understand the consequences of the actions charged.”

One of two mental health reports Gottlieb filed says a PET scan and an MRI, brain imaging procedures similar to X-rays, show conditions in Braunstein’s brain that “are similar to those observed in patients with schizophrenia.”

The second report, prepared by a psychologist who interviewed and tested the defendant between January and May, says Braunstein, 42, has suffered “psychotic breaks with reality,” paranoid delusions and an inability to control his impulses.

Braunstein, a journalist who once wrote for Women’s Wear Daily, has pleaded not guilty to charges of arson, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, sexual abuse and assault related to the attack on a former colleague in her home on Oct. 31, 2005.

Prosecutors say Braunstein set two small fires in the hallway outside the door of the 34-year-old woman’s apartment in Manhattan’s Chelsea area. With smoke filling the corridor, Braunstein pounded on her door, said he was from the fire department and demanded to be let in, prosecutors say.

Once in the woman’s apartment, prosecutors say, he knocked her out with chloroform, tied her up with a parachute cord and sexually abused her for more than 13 hours.

Braunstein left the city but was captured Dec. 16 on the University of Memphis campus.

Gottlieb says the two reports show his client “was very, very ill.”

“He’s been on a steady, downward spiral for many years,” the lawyer said.

The psychologist’s report, by Barbara R. Kirwin, Ph.D., says Braunstein was amazed the alleged sex attack received so much media attention. The report says he did not think the woman would call police.

“Mr. Braunstein really believed that his actions were of no consequence, unreal, as if they occurred in a play or a novel,” the Kirwin report says.

Kirwin’s report, referring to the brain scans, says, “The frontal lobe deficits observed in Mr. Braunstein’s brain are associated with schizophrenia. His documented behaviors reveal this illness in its most usual presentation.”

The brain scan report was based on examinations in April and May by Dr. Monte S. Buchsbaum, a Mount Sinai School of Medicine neurologist.

Braunstein’s mental condition is now stable because of medications at Bellevue Hospital Center and, for the past three weeks, in jail, Gottlieb said. He criticized the way psychoactive medicines were prescribed for Braunstein in the past.

“Doctors prescribed them in an abusive manner,” the lawyer said. “Over the years, he would go to various doctors when he was feeling the need for medication, and the doctor, without any thorough examination, prescribed medications that led to abuse.”

The lawyer also said his client, who stabbed himself in the neck just before he was arrested in Tennessee in December, is on suicide watch at a Rikers Island jail.

Braunstein, wearing jail clothing and his hands cuffed behind his back, sat and listened quietly and attentively during the proceeding.