The mother of Peter Braunstein, the man who allegedly posed as a firefighter and sexually abused a Chelsea woman on Halloween, told The New York Sun she hoped her son would commit suicide rather than be forced to serve a potential sentence in prison or a mental institution.

“I hope he kills himself,” Angele Braunstein, 75, said of her son from her Kew Gardens home yesterday as Mr. Braunstein sat in a solitary jail cell in Shelby County, Tenn. “It will be untenable for him” to be imprisoned, she said.

Mr. Braunstein was captured on Friday afternoon after an employee and student at the University of Memphis recognized Mr. Braunstein on campus and notified the college police, who are affiliated with the Memphis Police Department, the authorities said.

Armed with photographs of Mr. Braunstein, the officers closed in on him and used pepper spray after he threatened them with a pellet gun, the commanding officer of the Memphis Police’s homicide unit, Lieutenant Joseph Scott, said. Mr. Braunstein pulled out a three-inch knife – called a punch knife because it is typically used in a punching motion – and allegedly stabbed himself several times in the neck.

“If you stab yourself in the neck, you’re pretty much trying to kill yourself,” Lieutenant Scott said.

At one point, Lieutenant Scott said, Mr. Braunstein told investigators he was the man police had been pursuing.

Mr. Braunstein’s estranged father, Alberto Braunstein, 72, who was reported to have flown to Memphis to be near his son, recently told the Sun that should police catch his son, he might commit suicide. “I don’t know under those circumstances what he would do,” he said.

In an earlier interview, Ms. Braunstein described her son as a fragile man who could respond to the ongoing public scrutiny by killing himself. She called him a mentally ill man who overdosed last year in what may have been a failed bid to commit suicide. He also had a stint in Bellevue’s mental ward last year, she said.

Ms. Braunstein believes a lot of her son’s psychological problems stem from his difficulty in securing work as a freelance writer after he was fired from his writing job at Women’s Wear Daily in 2002. “He was very upset because he couldn’t get a job anywhere,” Ms. Braunstein said yesterday.

She said she was not going to Tennessee to be with her son because police informed her she would not be able to see him.

After police forced Mr. Braunstein to the ground on the college campus Friday, he was taken to a prison ward at Regional Medical Center at Memphis. A nursing supervisor at Regional Medical Center at Memphis, Jacqueline Smart, said Mr. Braunstein was released from the hospital at 9:30 p.m. Saturday. He was transported to a county jail in Shelby, the county in which Memphis is located.

Local police charged Mr. Braunstein with aggravated assault and possession of weapons on school property, both felonies, and he will be arraigned on the charges in a Tennessee court today, Lieutenant Scott said.

Mr. Braunstein then faces a slew of charges in New York City for the Halloween attack: Prosecutors were expected to draft an arrest warrant charging him with kidnapping, burglary, robbery, and sexual abuse, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Barbara Thompson, said. Mr. Braunstein is likely to be extradited to New York in the next couple of days, New York authorities said. If convicted of the top charge of kidnapping, Mr. Braunstein could receive a sentence of up to life in prison.

Mr. Braunstein allegedly planned an elaborate scheme in which he dressed as a firefighter on Halloween. He made his way into the building of a 34-year-old woman he knew vaguely from a place they both once worked, set a couple of fires, knocked on her apartment door, and pushed his way in, police said. Armed with a gun, he is alleged to have drugged and sexually abused the woman over a 13-hour period before fleeing the following morning for a Midtown hotel.

The suspect has been arrested before. In the spring he sent threatening e-mails to his ex-girlfriend, harassing her on the telephone at work and at home, menacing her with a knife, and e-mailing naked photographs of her to her co-workers, police sources and the criminal complaint said. In the summer he pleaded guilty to menacing.

Friday’s capture puts an end to the lengthy pursuit of Mr. Braunstein. Over the course of the month and a half, police chased a number of leads in New York and other states.

Just the day before he was nabbed, New York police confirmed that at the end of November Mr. Braunstein received $20 in cash for donating blood at a Memphis blood bank.