Metro

Attempted baby kidnapper has long history of illness

She’s a prisoner of her own mind.

Last week’s terrifying attempted baby-snatching in Chelsea isn’t the first in which Tara Anne McDonald, 46, has been accused, rec­ords show.

The delusional Long Island woman, who has battled schizophrenia and drugs for years, has cycled through the criminal and mental-health systems and once spent 1,000 days at Rikers Island as she waited to be admitted to a mental-health program, according to a 2005 Village Voice profile.

McDonald’s illness has her obsessed with babies she sees on the streets, leading her to try to “save” them, the report says.

In her 20s, McDonald was arrested at least five times for trying to rip plastic covers off random baby strollers — for fear the covers harmed the children inside.

In 1997, she was arrested on a felony kidnapping charge for trying to take a 15-month-old girl from her father. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 2¹/₂ years in jail but ended up shuttling between the jail and state psychiatric facilities.

And in 2002, McDonald — who reportedly was on the lam from Pilgrim State, a Long Island psychiatric hospital — made headlines after she was arrested for trying to snatch a baby from a Brooklyn mother.

The infant was the child of a Brooklyn prosecutor, and McDonald at the time had been on the run from a treatment program in Suffolk County.

McDonald was slated to join a residential mental-health program in Manhattan called The Bridge for five years, but it’s unclear whether she entered the program.

And on Thursday, McDonald made headlines again — allegedly grabbing a baby carriage from a nanny on Eighth Avenue near 17th Street, shouting, “Give me my baby.”

A UPS driver intervened, and McDonald was on the run until she was caught Friday. She was being treated at Bellevue, and has been charged with attempted kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child.

Her family declined to comment on her latest arrest.

Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick and Sabrina Ford