Rothenberg Going Free Again; Site Kept Secret : Crime: The New Yorker who tried to kill his son by setting him afire will head for an unknown destination. He will be closely watched.

Charles David Rothenberg, who set his son on fire eight years ago in a Buena Park motel, will be released today from a Northern California prison, his parole destination a closely guarded secret.

Sometime after midnight Tuesday, the man who made national headlines for trying to kill his boy in 1983 was to be freed under heavy security from the maximum-security Pelican Bay state prison near the Oregon border.

His release ends an eight-month sentence for a parole violation that he committed last September. State corrections officials had charged him with ducking out on his parole agent by sneaking out the back of a doughnut shop in Oakland, where he had been living since his initial parole Jan. 24, 1990. He denied trying to elude supervision and was captured a few hours later at a job interview.

And, as before, the man who torched his son in a bent quest to hurt the wife who divorced him will again be subject to what corrections officials call the tightest security of any California parolee.

In addition to an electronic anklet that alerts officials when a parolee removes it or leaves a predecided range, Rothenberg will be under 24-hour “physical supervision,” according to Tipton C. Kindel, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, which oversees the state’s prison system. Kindel said the former New York waiter would be living alone and, like all parolees, supported by the government until he finds a job.

Only Rothenberg and a cadre of parole agents knew Tuesday where he was headed, but Kindel said the celebrated felon will not be in Southern California, and he has been banned from contacting his 14-year-old son, his former wife and her husband.

Unlike last year, when public outrage triggered a cloak of secrecy about Rothenberg’s release and parole destination, there has been little fanfare this time.

Even the son he tried to burn to death and succeeded in permanently disfiguring is nonchalant about his father’s prison release. The Orange County high school freshman has changed his name to David Jordan Robinson, dropping his father’s name and adding those of his two professional basketball heroes.

“He asked about it last night for the first time, just to make sure all the security and conditions were the same as last time,” said Dick Hafdahl, David’s stepfather and a Buena Park police lieutenant who supervised the 1983 fire investigation. “We said yes (the security arrangements were in place), and he went off to talk to a friend on the phone like he always does.

“It hasn’t been much of a conversation topic around the house,” Hafdahl added. “It’s not as traumatic as it was the first time.”

In a letter this week to The Times, Rothenberg insisted he won’t pester his boy and would never harm him. He said he will “continue to seek and secure employment” once paroled but did not elaborate.

It was on March 3, 1983, that the jealousy-consumed father tried to hurt his ex-wife by murdering their son. He had custody of David, then 6, for what was to be a week’s stay in the Catskills.

Instead, he spirited David from New York to Orange County, where father and son spent a week visiting amusement parks and video parlors by day and lodging nights in Buena Park motels.

When he asked his former wife for more time with his boy, he let it slip that he was in California. She then threatened to withhold his visitation rights once the pair returned to their Brooklyn homes.

That same night, Rothenberg gave David a sleeping pill, poured kerosene around the bed where he was sleeping and struck a match to the bedspread before fleeing. He was captured a week later in San Francisco and confessed that he tried to kill his son, telling The Times, “if I can’t have him, nobody can.”

Third-degree burns scorched 90% of David’s body. He clung to life for weeks, his body a patchwork of grafted skin, and later spent months in hospitals here and back East undergoing multiple surgeries. His latest came about six weeks ago, a routine skin-graft operation on his knee and elbow.

His triumphs have inspired burn victims nationally and were featured in a television movie based on a book that his mother, Marie Hafdahl, co-wrote about her son’s trials.

He is now a happy, 5-foot-2 teen-ager with dreams of playing for the NBA.

“He figures he has to grow two feet,” Dick Hafdahl said Tuesday with a laugh. “But he’s in a growing spurt right now.”

Last year, he legally changed his name to David Jordan Robinson after two basketball players who befriended him: Chicago Bulls star Michael Jordan and the San Antonio Spurs’ David Robinson.

In his letter this week, Rothenberg said the name change had hurt him deeply, but “my son is now in his teens and is starting to think for himself.”

He still blames his former wife for trying to take away his son, at the same time insisting that he has never harbored any resentment toward David’s new family.

Corrections spokesman Kindel said Rothenberg’s parole conditions include participation in a “psychiatric-treatment program” and constant supervision, although he would not elaborate on the latter.

Rothenberg, 50, will “be under electronic surveillance” via the electronic monitor, “essentially a transmitter he wears on his person the size of a very large watch,” Kindel said.

Half the size of a cigarette pack, the device is permanently attached to the wrist or ankle. If activated, the wearer has a limited period of time with which to respond to a central computer system. If the parolee has removed the transmitter or traveled outside his parole area, officials are rapidly notified.

When he ducked out on his parole agent for four hours and lied about his whereabouts last September, Rothenberg did not leave the Oakland area to which he was paroled, Kindel said. But he was captured anyway, found to have violated his parole by failing to cooperate with his supervising agents and returned to San Quentin state prison.

By mid-November, he had been transferred to the Pelican Bay prison in Crescent City. Nine miles from downtown, it is a 3,600-inmate, maximum-security facility with cells designed to house felons such as Rothenberg, whose crimes make them vulnerable to attack by other inmates.

Surrounded by towering trees in the picturesque coastal town of 4,380 people near the Oregon border, the prison has helped pull the community out of a deep economic slump caused by the collapse of the local timber industry.

Here, Rothenberg has been among 1,300 inmates in cells by themselves, largely for their own protection. He has eaten, exercised and done just about everything else alone, Kindel said. He had no prison job, kept to himself and was never bothered,

When Rothenberg leaves the prison, Kindel said, he will have $200 “gate” money, from which he may choose to spend $38 on a prison-sewn “civilian” outfit that typically includes pants, a shirt, a jacket and undergarments.

As of today, “he will have his own living space. As to whether it’s an apartment or some other kind of dwelling . . . that can range anywhere from an apartment to a duplex to a house,” Kindel said. Because the idea is to help a parolee make the transition from prison to freedom, Kindel added, he will “not be joined at the hip” with a parole agent but under constant supervision. Rothenberg’s parole ends Sept. 21, 1993.

“From that point on, let’s face it,” Kindel said. “He can pretty much go where he likes.”