The man accused of raping a woman in Central Park suffers from a split-personality disorder that is responsible for his vicious attacks on elderly women, his brother told The Post today.
The world knows him as David Albert Mitchell — a vicious brute who has a long track record of allegedly raping, beating and robbing elderly women from W. Va. to Manhattan.
But his brother, Joseph, 42, says that the real culprit is an alter ego named Johnny.
“He was diagnosed when he was 14 years old and it got really bad in his 20’s,” said Joseph Mitchell. “He says that Johnny comes out. I first met Johnny when I was 22 years old, he broke my back. He hit me in the back with a brick. That was the first time I met him and I never seen him since.”
“I guess you all met Johnny out there in New York,” he added.
Mitchell said that his mother — whom David adored as a child — also suffered from split-personality disorder.
“She named her [other personality] Rae,” he said. “She was in a wheelchair and very weak but when Rae came out she could hop out of her wheelchair. She got her strength from Rae. But my mother could control it better than David.”
Mitchell said that his brother ended up in New York after saying he wanted to see the world.
“He said he never got to see nothing,” he said. “He’s been locked up in prisons his whole life. But I never dreamed he’d make it to New York or do anything up there.”
Mitchell just got out of prison last year for the 2003 abduction of an ex-girlfriend in Virginia, and he has twice been arrested for raping elderly women in his hometown. He was acquitted at trial in the first case, and pleaded guilty to a robbery charge to settle the second.
Mitchell was also a suspected in the murder of 54-year-old mother Barbara Flake in Jenkinjones in 2002, but cops never had enough evidence to bring charges.
dmacleod@nypost.com