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“He did a monstrous thing.”
A quiet Westchester County lawyer who griped that his estranged wife verbally abused him for years, finally snapped, beating her to death with a stick of furniture — and then turning his twisted rage onto his sleeping, innocent young kids, cops said yesterday.
After bludgeoning wife Amy, a crazed Sam Friedlander went into each child’s bedroom, blasting his 8-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter with a 12-gauge Remington shotgun — and then chillingly tucked them in before heading to the basement to blow his brains out, cops said.
The horrific, blood-drenched scene in sleepy, suburban Lewisboro early Tuesday came as Friedlander, 50, and his 46-year-old wife, a college test-prep adviser, were scheduled today to begin a two-day divorce trial.
“Sam’s not a monster,” said his devastated law-school classmate and friend, Michael Borg. “He did a monstrous thing.
“The person who did this yesterday is not the person I know,” Borg said, noting how much Sam had “loved” the children, Molly and Gregory, whom he so coldly gunned down.
But Borg and another buddy both described how in the past year, mild-mannered and “brilliant” Sam resembled a “beaten man” as he repeatedly complained about being demeaned by double Ivy League grad Amy and her wealthy parents, and how they allegedly tried to alienate him from their kids.
However, Amy’s grief-wracked dad Gary Perez, 68, angrily retorted, “They don’t know what they’re talking about . . . My daughter was a nice, sweet, loving person.”
Perez said it was Sam who “for eight of the 10 years” of the couple’s marriage subjected Phi Beta Kappa grad Amy to “emotionally significant” abuse.
And “he didn’t make very much money and he didn’t support his family . . . If it wasn’t for my daughter, the kids wouldn’t have food,” Perez said.
But Sam told his pals that in the past five years, former Chase banker Amy would treat and talk to him “like he was a piece of s–t, like he was worthless, totally emasculating him,” Borg said.
Borg said that when his own son had his bar mitzvah last year, Friedlander called him that morning and asked if he knew someone with kids whose clothes he could borrow for Molly and Gregory because his wife had “hid their clothing.”
David Pine, another Western New England College Law School pal of Friedlander, said Sam “was exhibiting signs of being emotionally abused.”
“He said to me, ‘They [Amy and her immediate family] want to take me down,’ meaning destroy him financially, destroy him emotionally and have him out of the kids’ lives,” Pine said. “I knew that an incident would happen in that household.”
Howard Bernstein, husband of Amy’s business partner, said, “Sam had stopped working and had no money. He was on meds and he was no longer taking the meds.”
Friedlander, a former Suffolk County prosecutor who had also worked at the prominent Skadden Arps law firm, last year filed for divorce from Amy.
But he continued living in a separate bedroom in their $800,000, four-bedroom home, which the couple had put up for sale, authorities said.
In the past week, “there was some indication that Mr. Friedlander was acting irrationally,” said State Police Maj. Michael Kopy, who did not elaborate.
“But nobody said anything like this would happen.”
Amy’s father agreed, saying he never knew Sam to be violent.
“I never in my wildest dreams ever thought that he was capable of doing what he did. Never,” said the former Philadelphia-area restaurateur.
“I doubly never would have imagined that he would do it to his children — because he loved his children.
“He just murdered her and he murdered my two grandchildren. He took a goddamn shotgun and he blew his children in half!”