By 9 o’clock, reporters and cops in riot gear were sharing the sidewalks with moms and strollers. Other officers perched on rooftops. The press trolled for a scoop and a team of dogs sniffed for Braunstein. “I was working from home all day,” Greg Lindsay remembered. “I heard the helicopters circling overhead for hours.”
A reader wrote in to Gawker to describe a “gaggle of reporters... standing across the street from the stupidly named Bococa Café.” Cops mingled with the press on the street while helicopters looked down from above. “On a side note,” the reader added, “a beat cop walked up to one of the cameramen and asked what was going on. The cameraman gave him the 411. I love when the media fill in the fuzz.”
Patrick Cadigan, who lived on Smith Street between Dean and Pacific at the time, was following the story in the papers and found the café owner’s account at least somewhat credible.
“He saw him, thought he recognized the customer, and the guy took off. That sealed it. It must have been him,” Cadigan said. “Or,” he considered, “it was a guy who got his coffee and wanted to leave.”
Braunstein’s mother spoke exclusively to the New York Sun, telling the conservative broadsheet that her son regularly drank coffee with milk and was likely at least somewhat familiar with Cobble Hill, as his ex-wife lived near the Bococa Café.
Sophie Donelson, then an editor at City magazine, believed Braunstein was around somewhere nearby, but doubted that he got his coffee at Bococa Café.
“No one really goes to that café. If he was at Bar Tabac or Patois, I’d believe it,” she said. “But there were moms and nannies everywhere and a rapist on the loose. It was such a weird juxtaposition.”
Gawker was quick to blast Bococa Café owner John Arena on November 18:
Oh, you saw the fiend, did you? Peter Braunstein came into your Cobble Hill coffee shop and bought a $2 cuppa joe? You even looked him in the eye? You were sure it was him, yeah? He knew that you knew, oh yes!
So, uh, why the hell did you just watch him walk away? Here’s a suggestion: follow him out the door, shout and point, and CHASE THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN! He’s a journalist, for chrissakes, just some wussy writer!
Clearly, this was a matter best left to police dogs.
With a pillow from Braunstein’s mother’s house in Kew Gardens as a reference, the NYPD’s canine members picked up the fugitive’s scent. A bloodhound named Chase tracked Braunstein two blocks and then lost him again, the Sun reported. A few blocks on, Chase showed signs of a trail. He took his handlers to an abandoned brownstone on Henry and Congress, but Braunstein wasn’t there. Police found no evidence that anyone had been there at all. But still, it was possible.
Possible enough for the Post’s Andrea Peyser, who gave Braunstein a shrill, staccato scolding for showing up in Brooklyn, headlined, BRAZEN BRAUNSTEIN’S GOT A LATTE NERVE. Whereupon the column tore into neighborhood residents for failing to lead the manhunt.
“As he walked through a neighborhood where his former colleagues live, no one recognized Peter Braunstein,” Peyser wrote. “That’s because no one was looking.”
But Cobble Hill is not the type of place for neighborhood watch groups. That’s more Park Slope. The mob did not light torches, grab pitchforks, and go from brownstone to brownstone. Instead, neighbors stayed home. Children disappeared from the streets. Police distributed Wanted leaflets with an unflattering drawing of a Jheri-curled Braunstein and the promise of a $12,000 reward for information leading to his capture.
“Every single door on our street had that blue flier attached with that awful, awful sketch,” Lindsay remembered with disgust. “For days you would see them up and down the street. Peter Braunstein had come to my block, my entire universe as a freelancer. He was there for at least a week, quasihaunting us.”
Lindsay tore the flier down — “I couldn’t bear to have it there,” he said — but Braunstein’s face lined Smith, Court, and countless cross streets for days. Patrick Cadigan saw the posters littering the train station for at least a week, but noticed that the fear died down after a day or two.
“I wondered why he would still be here unless he had a network of people hiding him, which didn’t seem very likely,” Cadigan said. He walked his girlfriend to the train station as usual, but tried to be more alert. Otherwise, what else was to be done?
Andrea Peyser’s urgings to the contrary, the people of Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, and Cobble Hill got self-cautious. It is a similar mind-set to the one adopted after September 11: Protect yourself as best you can and be mindful that there is little you personally can do about terrorists flying into buildings or depraved sex offenders on the lam in your neighborhood. Detached thrills are perhaps, in part, why people live here.
Laura Davis was working at HarperCollins in November 2005 and sharing a Cobble Hill apartment with two roommates. One of them joked about seeing a man on the roof who may have been Braunstein. But in a serious conversation concerning personal safety, Davis said, “We talked about making sure we pushed the door to our apartment shut as we were coming and going, instead of trusting it to swing shut on its own. It had been left open many times before and I remember Peter Braunstein’s name being invoked as to why we needed to make a greater effort to close the door.”
Braunstein was spotted again on November 18, this time at a business on Henry Street. At M&N Cleaners, a man who the Post said was “looking rushed, and possibly covered in stage makeup,” asked for a coat hanger because he had locked himself out of his car. An employee told the tabloid that the customer was rude and demanding and then took off. “It is not known if Braunstein really had a car, or what he wanted with the hanger,” the Post reported dryly.
Then again, just past midnight on November 21, a resident swore he passed Braunstein walking east on Degraw between Hicks and Cheever.
So — memorize the face, lock the door, walk the ladies to the train. Be mindful to whom you sell coffee. Report all agitated people who lock their keys in the car to the police. Be vigilant during your late-night walks home. Because you never know who you might see.
“I have never known my son to even go to Brooklyn,” Peter Braunstein’s estranged father told the Daily News. The article — published on November 19 and smugly titled, CAFÉ SEARCH GROUNDLESS? — was the first whiff of doubt about Braunstein hiding out in BoCoCa.
The New York Observer, a contrarian weekly, pooh-poohed the bulk of daily tabloid reportage by suggesting in a December 5 article that maybe — just maybe — Braunstein had never been on the unglamourous side of the river.
“Forget the massive manhunt,” wrote the Observer’s Mark Lotto. “Is Peter Braunstein the last freelancer in New York who thinks he’s too good for Brooklyn?”
Well into December, more than two weeks after the last Braunstein sighting, there was no hint of him in Brooklyn. The Wanted posters got weirdly more detailed — Braunstein drinks Guinness and vodka! He likes beef curry with extra mustard! — but BoCoCa’s watchful citizens saw nothing.
Which makes sense, really, because when the city thought Braunstein was buying coffee and borrowing coat hangers in Brooklyn, the closest he got to the County of Kings was at a storage facility on 36th Street and Northern Boulevard in Queens, which is home to so few media folk that it took newspapers at least three days to report the extent of a 2006 blackout affecting more than 125,000 residents.