On November 12, 2012, a 20-year-old man carrying a sledgehammer, a kitchen knife and zip ties entered an office building in Midtown Manhattan. His target was a psychiatrist. The events that led to the attack began years earlier.
A Relationship Marked by Conflict
The psychiatrist was Dr. Michael Weiss. His former partner, Dr. Pamela Buchbinder, was also a psychiatrist in New York City and had received her training at an Ivy League institution.
Their romantic relationship was unstable from the start, repeatedly ending and resuming. Each accused the other of domestic violence, and some of their arguments became physical.
While the relationship lasted, Michael attended family parties among Pamela’s relatives, including the bar mitzvah of her young cousin, Jake Nolan.
The couple had a son, Calder, but they never married, and they separated for good soon after he was born. The conflict between them produced criminal complaints on both sides.
On one occasion, Pamela attacked Michael with broken glass; he needed stitches, and she was arrested and charged with assault. Michael was also arrested at one point, after Pamela said he had threatened her or tried to assault her. The charges in both cases were dismissed.
The former partners then fought over custody of Calder in family court. Michael’s attorney, Roland Acevedo, has said the two had no communication during the dispute.
Jake Moves In With His Cousin
Jake Nolan is the son of Jim and Debbie Nolan, who live outside Miami. Pamela is Debbie’s niece, and Jake has said he formed a bond with her when he was very young.
When Calder was four, Pamela asked the 20-year-old Jake to become the boy’s godfather. Shortly afterward, she offered to take him into her Manhattan apartment on a part-time basis.
Under the proposed arrangement, Pamela would give Jake therapy sessions and monitor his medications, and Jake would help look after Calder.
Debbie has said she adored Pamela and trusted her with her most prized possession, her child, so the Nolans welcomed the offer. Jake agreed as well and has said he believed Pamela was going to save his life. Debbie has said that he seemed happy and stable in the months that followed.
She has also said that Jake, who had been feeling poorly about himself, now felt important to Calder and believed that everything he did had to be right.
Jake has described the boy as a child he loved more than his own life, and he has described Pamela as brilliant, saying he would have done anything for her.
Photographs from this period show Jake, Pamela and Calder in bed together in the morning. Jake has said the photographs reflect how comfortable he felt and that he saw the three of them as a family.
His father, Jim, has said there was never a romantic or sexual relationship between Jake and Pamela. Text messages from Pamela were found on Jake’s phone.
In them, she called him “lovey” and “sweet Jake,” told him he was “the most fun person to love,” described him as beautiful, remarkable and brilliant, and wrote that she missed him terribly when he was away. Jake has said that to this day he does not know what her intentions were.
Jake has said that during these months Pamela began making serious claims about Michael. She told him that Michael was refusing to pay child support and, Jake says, convinced him that Michael was molesting Calder at his home, repeating the claim every day.
Jake has acknowledged that he saw no evidence of it. Michael has denied ever abusing his son, and Acevedo says Michael worships the child.
Jake says these claims were how Pamela drew him into a plot to kill Michael. He has said her ideas included injecting Michael with poisonous chemicals, burning him alive in front of a group of people, and having Jake strike him repeatedly on the head while the Beatles song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” played in the house.
November 12, 2012
On the night of November 11, Pamela and Jake went to a Home Depot in New York City. Surveillance video recorded Pamela paying cash for a sledgehammer while Jake stood beside her.
Zip ties were also purchased. That night, Jake says, Pamela gave him a hand-drawn map showing the multiple entrances to Michael’s building.
Pamela has said she never gave Jake a knife and that the map was meant to help him care for Calder, since it marked a daycare as well as Michael’s building.
Acevedo has said he believes the map was meant to let Jake reach Michael without passing through the building’s normal security measures.
The accounts of the next morning come from Jake, Pamela and Michael, and they differ in places. Jake says he woke with Pamela beside him, rubbing his back and telling him that he was a savior and the greatest person ever, and that no one else understood her.
He says her loving mood soon changed and that she then packed a duffel bag with the sledgehammer and a kitchen knife, crying hysterically as she did so. Before he left, he says, she told him that life would be much better after Michael was “terminated.”
Jake carried the map to Michael’s high-rise in Midtown Manhattan, where Michael both lived and kept his psychiatry office. The building had two separate entrances, and Jake looked it over from several sides before entering through the business entrance.
At the sign-in desk he used his own name and wrote that he was going to a tutoring center in the building called Bright Kids, which was marked on the map. He has said he made no attempt to hide his identity because he was willing to die for Pamela.
Jake went to the 12th floor and walked into Michael’s office while Michael was meeting with a patient. He left and waited in a stairwell.
Jake has said that he had come intending to kill Michael but that he felt nervous, wanted to back out, and could not return to Pamela without finishing the task.
When the patient left, Jake asked Michael for financial forms for Calder’s school. Pamela has said that collecting the forms was the only reason Jake went there.
Jake says the request was a ruse to distract Michael while he went into the restroom to prepare. There he took out the sledgehammer and put the knife in his pocket. He has said he remembers only parts of what followed.
Acevedo has described Michael’s recollection of the attack in detail. Jake came out of the bathroom and attacked Michael with the 10-pound sledgehammer. Michael ducked in time to avoid its full force, and the hammer struck his shoulder.
Jake then took out the knife and stabbed him seven or eight times, in the stomach, back, chest and other places. Michael, who is six feet three inches tall and weighed 205 pounds, eventually overpowered Jake on the ground. Jake has said that during the struggle he thought someone was bound to die.
The two men ended up in the hallway, where neighbors heard the commotion and called 911. Police later found the sledgehammer on the floor of Michael’s office. Jake did not try to flee.
Sitting on the hallway floor next to Michael, he took a photograph of himself covered in blood. He has said he was reporting back to Pamela and asking what to do next. She did not reply.
Both men were taken to the hospital. Michael had multiple cuts to his upper body and legs, and he was stitched up and released. Jake had wounds to his chest and hand, and police arrested him there for attempted murder. He was handcuffed to his hospital bed.
From the hospital, he texted Pamela, asking her to come. He told her that Michael was bleeding badly and claimed that Michael had stabbed him with Jake’s own knife.
Pamela answered with a single word: “Where?” She later came to the emergency room but was not allowed to see him. Jake has said he was in a full-blown psychotic episode and heavily medicated with morphine at that point.
Bail, a Custody Ruling and a Trial
Jake spent four days recovering in the hospital. He then appeared before a judge, who released him on $200,000 bail while he awaited trial, and he returned to his parents’ home outside Miami. Weeks after the attack, he first said that Pamela had manipulated him into carrying it out.
Soon after the attack, Michael went to family court to seek custody of Calder, arguing that Pamela was the mastermind. In 2015, a judge reviewed the evidence, including the Home Depot images, and awarded Michael full custody.
The court barred Pamela from any contact with the boy for five years and agreed that she had been involved in the plan to attack and kill Michael.
Michael also filed a civil lawsuit against Pamela over the attack. In her court papers she called the claims against her utterly baseless and said she never asked Jake to attack or harm Michael. Her side has also pointed out that no emails or text messages show that she and Jake plotted the attack together.
Despite the family court findings, Pamela was not criminally charged at that time, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to comment. Jake was the only person facing charges.
He spent much of the time before his trial moving in and out of treatment centers for mental health problems and for drug and alcohol addiction.
In May 2015, he poisoned himself in an attempt to take his own life and fell into a coma. His family was told that doctors did not think he would survive. He recovered.
His trial began in New York in March 2016. Prosecutors portrayed him as a spoiled rich kid and challenged his credibility, because the account he had given of the attack had changed over time.
When first responders arrived, he pointed at Michael and said Michael had stabbed him. He later told investigators that he never swung the sledgehammer because it was too heavy for him to lift.
In a third version, he said Michael had pulled the sledgehammer from Jake’s bag and attacked him with it first. He said he had brought the weapons only because he was afraid of Michael.
Prosecutors also pointed to a possible financial motive. Michael held a $1.5 million life insurance policy with Calder as the beneficiary, and three days before the attack he had agreed to make Pamela the irrevocable trustee, meaning that if he died she would control the money on the child’s behalf. Jake said Pamela never mentioned the policy to him.
The jury also watched clips of an interview Jake gave before the trial to a psychiatrist hired by the prosecution.
In it, he explained why the zip ties had been bought: Pamela wanted Michael tortured before he was killed, including by being mutilated, and Jake refused. Asked whether he had been willing to kill Michael but not to torture him, he said yes.
He also said he had been in control “to a degree,” and that the agreement was to kill Michael, not to torture him. Prosecutors argued that this showed Jake knew what he was doing and took part willingly, setting limits when he chose.
Jake’s lawyers did not dispute that he carried out the attack. They argued diminished capacity, meaning that he lacked the intent required for the crime. Dr. Sasha Bardey, who evaluated Jake and testified for the defense, said that Pamela had replaced Jake’s free will with her own.
He acknowledged that no one had held a gun to Jake’s head but said that, psychologically, someone had.
He described the relationship as a cult with only two members, with Pamela as the leader and Jake as the follower, and he said that involving Jake in developing the plan was part of the process. Jake did not testify. Pamela did not appear in court, and neither side called her as a witness.
After a two-week trial, the jury deliberated for less than an hour and found Jake guilty of attempted murder. He called the verdict unjust and said he was no harm to society.
A little over three months later, the judge described the attack as an act of extreme brutality and violence and sentenced Jake to nine and a half years in prison.
Acevedo said Michael had been traumatized by the attack. Jake has said that he accepts that what he did was very serious but that Pamela also needed to take responsibility.
Charges Against Pamela Buchbinder
On October 19, 2017, almost five years after the attack, Pamela was arrested at a friend’s house outside Syracuse, New York. The Manhattan District Attorney charged her with second-degree attempted murder and first-degree attempted assault, accusing her of masterminding the plot to send Jake to kill Michael.
Outside the courthouse, she told reporters, “My name is Pamela and I’m not guilty.” Acevedo said that prosecutors had indicated during Jake’s trial that they believed Pamela was involved. At the time of her arrest, she had her passport, her birth certificate and Calder’s expired passport with her.
Her defense attorneys, Ronald Fischetti and Eric Franz, said that the video of the sledgehammer purchase was a distraction and that Pamela, an educated psychiatrist, would not plan a murder with a sledgehammer.
They asked two judges to grant her bail, and her family offered to post a $1.5 million bond. The attorneys said she had not tried to flee during the five years after the attack: she had hired lawyers and a bail bondsman and had stayed in the area. They also argued that Jake was the sole perpetrator.
As part of that argument, her legal team pointed to a note they said had been found in their files. They said Jake wrote it to his mother while he recovered in the hospital in 2012, and it read, “Pamela has nothing to do with this.
This man acted completely on his own.” Jake’s defense team has said he wrote it in what his doctors described as a manic state, and Acevedo said it probably could not be admitted into evidence because it is hearsay.
The judge refused bail, and Pamela was held at Rikers Island jail in New York, where she remained for five years because of legal delays and the pandemic.
On September 7, 2022, at a pretrial hearing, Pamela accepted a plea deal. She pleaded guilty to first-degree attempted assault and first-degree burglary in exchange for an 11-year prison sentence followed by five years of post-release supervision.
The Manhattan District Attorney said that her plea admitted that she and Jake bought the sledgehammer with cash at a Home Depot on West 23rd Street, that she gave him a kitchen knife, which she had earlier said she never did, and that she drew a map and instructed him how to enter Michael’s building. Her attorney said she did not admit to taking part in a plot to kill Michael.
On October 11, 2022, at what was expected to be a routine sentencing, her lawyers told the court that she wanted to withdraw her plea.
They said that on the day she agreed to the deal, she had been exposed to mace at Rikers Island, had not taken her medication, and had gotten a contact high from someone smoking drugs on the bus to court.
Judge Thomas Farber, who had presided over Jake’s trial, rejected the request and ordered the plea deal to stand.
At the hearing, Michael delivered a victim impact statement and asked not to be recorded. He told the court that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and believes Pamela hates him so much that she will try to harm him even after her release.
Prosecutor Joel Seidemann told the court that Pamela had sought to destroy Michael because of their failed relationship.
He said her academic brilliance had not allowed her to outwit the police, who traced the sledgehammer to Home Depot as soon as they found it. The judge told Pamela she could speak if she wished but did not have to. She spoke briefly, saying that if the prosecutor had said one true thing, she had missed it.
Judge Farber said there could be no doubt that a person who plots to bash someone’s head in with a sledgehammer intends to cause that person’s death. He said the evidence at Jake’s trial supported Jake’s account that Pamela planned to brutally murder Michael.
He sentenced her to 11 years in prison and issued an order of protection for Michael. Pamela must stay away from Michael, but she is allowed to contact their son.
As officers led her away, Pamela turned to her family and friends, who blew kisses to her. Her defense attorney, Monica Nejathaim, has said that in 2027 Pamela will be free to start her life over and to reach out to her son.
Jake Nolan’s Early Life
Jake’s parents have described the history that preceded his stay in Pamela’s home. Jake was the third and youngest child of Jim and Debbie Nolan, who describe him as a delight: gifted, smart and fond of inventing things, and a really good kid without a mean bone in his body.
By the age of five, he had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Around the ages of 14 and 15, his parents noticed significant changes in his personality and behavior, including large mood swings.
At his high school in Miami, Jake made news by winning a prestigious contest as the co-inventor of Flash Me, a study tool app for iPhones.
A month later, he could not get out of bed, and his parents offered him every kind of reward and pleaded with him to go to school. He was diagnosed with depression and anxiety.
At 17, he threatened to kill himself. He carried a butcher knife from downstairs to his bedroom and said he intended to use it. His parents were terrified, and he was hospitalized.
Doctors diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, a severe and chronic mental illness marked by dramatic mood swings, from deep depression to periods of intense elation, grandiose ideas and poor judgment.
By the time he was in college, doctors had prescribed about 30 medications, sometimes four to six at once, with little success. Jake has also acknowledged using illegal drugs and drinking, and he barely made it to class.
In the summer of 2016, he said he had been taking medications for more than a year and a half that had finally worked for him.
Asked what he would say if Calder one day wanted to know why he had tried to kill the boy’s father, Jake said he did not know, that he would give everything for the child, and that his willingness to kill for him showed how sorry he felt.
He has said there will never be a night when he does not fall asleep feeling awful about what he did. His parents say that sending him to live with Pamela was the biggest mistake they have ever made, and they call the experience a total, horrible nightmare.
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