KENDRA KILLER SET TO GO FREE
Subway schizo served 19 yrs.
The schizophrenic man who killed an aspiring young screenwriter by shoving her in front of a subway — sparking statewide reforms of mental-health law — is expected to walk free from prison next week.
Andrew Goldstein went off his meds and killed then-32-year-old Kendra Webdale in 1999 at the 23rd Street station on the Broadway line.
He’s expected to be released from Sing Sing Correctional Facility on Sept. 14 after serving 19 years of his 23-year sentence in the case that gripped the city’s attention for several years.
His first trial ended in a hung jury. In his second, he was convicted of murder. But an appeals court struck down the decision.
He cut a plea deal in 2006, copping to manslaughter.
When he’s conditionally released, he’ll be a prime candidate for Kendra’s Law — which was passed in the wake of the killing and requires violent, mentally ill parolees follow a prescribed course of treatment or face commitment in a hospital, according to a new profile in New York magazine.
“You know, it’s a very good law,” Goldstein, 48, told the magazine. “Not like some totalitarian law where they could just throw you in a mental hospital. They have legal requirements, a hearing, yes sir.”
The program — championed by Webdale’s family following her death — requires individuals with mental-health issues and a history of violence to comply with state Assisted Outpatient Treatment programs as a condition of their reintroduction to society.
The law was instituted in 1999 but must be renewed every few years. State lawmakers last year renewed the provision through 2022. Goldstein believes it should be made permanent.
“If you are a harm to anyone, even yourself, you should be hospitalized,” he told The Post in 2012.
“The court has the right to hospitalize and medicate.”
Goldstein attacked 13 people in the two years before he killed Webdale, including psychiatrists, a nurse and a social worker.
But he also frequently sought help for his schizophrenia — voluntarily committing himself to mental-health wards 13 times in the years before Webdale’s killing — but struggled to get lasting care amid fiscal belt-tightening in the 1990s.
He now takes a daily cocktail of anti-psychotics including Haldol, Cogentin, Abilify and Zyprexa and has not had a documented violent incident since 2003, when he hit a prison facilitator who asked him to clean his cell.
“It makes me feel like a jigsaw puzzle that patterns out,” he said of the medications.
The Assisted Outpatient Treatment regimen may include urinalysis, which lets case workers monitor whether patients are taking medicines as prescribed.
“It’s a horrible thing, what happened in that station,” Goldstein said. “But if I would have taken my meds, I would have been in the right frame of mind . . . yikes.”
Goldstein will be evaluated by a clinical team and a psychologist before a judge determines what kind of treatment he’ll require post-release, according to New York magazine. If he meets Kendra’s Law criteria, he would be assigned a caseworker and get priority for one of the state’s 40,000 mental-health housing units.
When he gets out, Goldstein says he plans to lay a wreath on Kendra’s grave.
The state Office of Mental Health did not return a request for comment Monday. mjaeger@nypost.com