While the story of the fake firefighter alleged to have sexually attacked a woman in her Chelsea apartment on Halloween has played out in the press in great detail – linguistic and pictorial – it wasn’t until yesterday that the police officially declared that Peter Braunstein is the prime suspect in the case.

Accompanying the announcement came the first official photographs of the suspect unveiled by the Police Department: one is a mug shot from Mr. Braunstein’s spring arrest for menacing an ex-girlfriend, and the other two were from surveillance footage at a Midtown hotel where Mr. Braunstein allegedly stayed shortly after the crime. Police officials said they chose yesterday for the public announcement because it was then that they first felt their case was strong enough to warrant arresting and charging Mr. Braunstein with the attack.

Mr. Braunstein, 41, has evaded capture since October 31, when he allegedly dressed and acted like a firefighter as a ruse to ease his way into a woman’s West 24th Street apartment, where he drugged and sexually assaulted her. Mr. Braunstein and the 34-year-old victim both reportedly worked at Women’s Wear Daily at the same time, although they apparently did not know each other. News accounts have placed Mr. Braunstein in New York City since the attack. Such a theory did not seem farfetched to some criminal justice experts.

“It’s easy to be anonymous in New York City,” a forensic psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who is an expert in sexually motivated anti-social behavior, Louis Schlesinger, said. The former head of the sex crimes unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Linda Fairstein, described the city as an ideal place in which to hide.