2011 victim tells horror tale of susp

He vaguely knew Darryl Jones from the neighborhood.

Now he can’t forget the day nearly a decade ago they brushed past one another in the stairwell of a Morningside Heights apartment building.

“He pushed me down seven flights of stairs. The only reason I’m alive is because he thought I was dead,” the crime victim told the Daily News about the Aug. 14, 2011, encounter, asking that his name not be used.

Jones, 30, was arrested and spent seven years in jail for the assault and robbery. His 59-year-oldvictim — visiting a friend in the building where Jones lived — was in a medically-induced coma for three days and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

“(The system) failed everybody,” he told The News, adding he only heard about Jones’ release from a neighborhood friend. “He was supposed to get 25 to life. He got seven years.”

The victim said when he and his wife heard on the news Jones had been re-arrested Thursday for a heinous attack on a Jewish family in Manhattan, his wife “started screaming.”

“It said he had just been released,” he said. “We knew there couldn’t be that many people named Darryl Jones.”

The victim said he remembers vividly when he and Jones passed each other in the stairwell on the day of the 2011 assault, “he was completely quiet.”

“He had a steel plate that covers a cable box and he hit me with that on the back of my head,” the victim recalled. “I fell on my face. He said ‘You mother f—-er! I’m going to kill you!”

The victim then tumbled down the steps, landing in the basement. At some point, he said, Jones began to choke him before running off with his wallet and glasses.

“When I woke up I was completely drenched in blood,” he remembered. “I made it from that building to the precinct completely blind.”

“I had 16 facial fractures. I had to learn how to eat,” he said, adding he still suffers from seizures as well as longand short-term memory loss.

“I had to learn how to walk, how to talk. I’m still not 100%.”