By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — The Harvard Law School graduate who allegedly set fire to an East Side chapel holding 9/11 victims’ remains has lost his job offer from a prestigious Manhattan law firm, according to reports.
Brian Schroeder told police he was drunk when he scaled a fence Saturday morning and “lit up” frames, plants and benches inside.
“It felt like an adventure,” Brian Schroeder told investigators after turning himself in to police that night, according to a one-page complaint filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. “I thought I was dreaming.”
Originally from Texas, Schroeder graduated from Duke University, where he studied theater, in 2005, and graduated from Harvard Law School this year. He reportedly moved to New York to take an internship with the prestigious Sidley Austin law firm. The firm offered a permanent job, but rescinded it on Monday, a partner at the firm told the Daily News.
Schroeder, 26, spent the rest of the weekend in jail. He was released Monday after posting $3,000 bail.
He is due back in court on Jan. 11. He faces charges of arson, reckless endangerment, burglary and criminal mischief.
One of his lawyers told the News that he might have been drugged. “He voluntarily went to the precinct the next day after he realized the gravity of what had happened,” Gary Lesser said.
There was no sign of Schroeder Monday at his six-story apartment building on E. 21st Street, across the street from the New York Police Department’s 13th Precinct station house and just a few blocks from the torched chapel.
The chapel, at Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive and E. 30th Street, is known as “Memorial Park” and is considered hallowed ground to the families of people who died in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Built as a temporary morgue for thousand of human remains, it became a climate-controlled shrine for families who didn’t have anything of their loved ones to bury.
None of the remains was damaged in the 6 a.m. fire, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. But almost all of the pictures, notes and other mementos were either damaged or went missing.
His mother told the News that the charges were out of character for her son. She described him as a native Texan who had put off his start date at Sidley Austin to do human rights and international law work in Switzerland.
"We're all dumbfounded," she said.
