Retired Doctor Charged With Running Down 2 Pedestrians

Manslaughter charges were filed in Massachusetts Tuesday against a retired Van Nuys doctor who authorities said ran down two pedestrians--killing one and injuring the other--and then checked into the psychiatric ward of a New York hospital.

John F. Kappler, 60, is accused of killing a Boston psychiatrist and injuring another person after he lost control of his car in Cambridge on Saturday, said Tom Samoluk, deputy district attorney of Middlesex County. Kappler also faces charges of assault and leaving the scene of an injury accident.

Police said Kappler, a former anesthesiologist at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, disappeared after the incident. He surfaced a day later at a New York hospital.

Kappler checked into the hospital for treatment of an “acute episode of mental illness that we believe caused the accident,” said Jonathan Shapiro, a Boston attorney hired by Kappler’s family. Shapiro would not elaborate on Kappler’s condition and declined to comment on whether his client has a history of mental illness.

Shapiro said Kappler will return to Massachusetts within the “next day or so” and will surrender to authorities when he is released from treatment.

Samoluk would not comment on the terms of Kappler’s surrender, and authorities did not know how Kappler made his way to New York.

“Our intention is to bring him back as expeditiously as possible to face arraignment on these criminal charges,” he said.

According to police reports, Kappler was driving from his daughter’s home in Cambridge to his son’s house in New York about 10:30 a.m. Saturday when he lost control of his car and drove onto a footpath that runs parallel to the Alewise Brook Parkway.

The car struck Paul Mendelsohn, 32, of Arlington, Mass., who was jogging, before hitting Deborah Brunet-Tuttle, 32, of Cambridge, who was carrying two bags of groceries, about 100 yards away, said Officer Larry Gillis of the Massachusetts Metropolitan Police Department.

Mendelsohn, a psychiatrist at the New England Medical Center in Boston, died from his injuries at 2:05 a.m. Sunday, Gillis said. He said Brunet-Tuttle was in serious but stable condition Tuesday at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Police found a blue 1987 Hyundai abandoned minutes after the incident about half a mile away. They traced the car to Kappler but were unable to locate him. Shapiro said authorities were notified Sunday night that Kappler had checked into the hospital.

Kappler was accused of attempted murder in May, 1985, in the unauthorized removal of a brain-damaged patient’s life-support system. The charges were dismissed a month later because no witnesses were able to identify Kappler as being in the patient’s room when the life-support system was disconnected.