A crooked Brooklyn doctor about to report to a federal lockup stopped first at his parents' gravesite, pulled out a gun and killed himself Friday.

 

Orthopedic surgeon Gregory Perrier, 46, pleaded guilty three years ago to filing phony bills and was due to turn himself in to serve a one-year sentence at noon.

 

He asked his lawyer, Al Walker, to take him to a cemetery so he could visit his parents' grave on the way to the Otisville Federal Prison in Orange County, a police source said.

 

When they arrived at Cypress Hills Cemetery on the Brooklyn-Queens border, Perrier fatally shot himself in the head, the source said.

 

He fell to the ground, face up, his left hand on his chest. There was a sports coat on his lap and a bouquet of mixed flowers at his side.

 

"I'm crushed," said a previous lawyer, Edward Sapone. "He had six wonderful children and a supportive wife."

 

Near the Dix Hills, L.I., home where Perrier lived, neighbors were stunned.

 

"He's a good man, a well-respected man," one said. "I know he was having some problems but to think it would come to this is just something else all together."

 

Perrier, who worked out of a Flatlands office, "got unfortunately caught up" in fraud with a colleague, Sapone said.

 

The judge in the case, John Gleeson, twice allowed Perrier, then awaiting sentencing, to travel to Haiti last year to help victims of a devastating earthquake.

 

"I have this burning desire of helping my fellow haitians," he wrote.

 

With Matthew Lysiak