Breaking silence

Bodega owner: We did try to save Junior

The Bronx bodega owner accused of heartlessly standing by while an innocent teen was dragged out of his store and slaughtered broke his silence on Friday — apologizing to the family and saying he did all he could to help the boy.

“I just feel very bad,” a tearful Modesto Cruz, the owner of the Cruz and Chiky store (above) in Belmont, told reporters.

Cruz and his workers at the East 183rd Street and Bathgate Avenue bodega appeared to give the boot to Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz as he was bleeding out in the store on June 20, following an attack by a group of Trinitarios gang members. Law- makers have since called for the bodega to be shut down.

“I was closing the store. I already passed the key to close the store when somebody go and jump all over the counter,” Cruz said in broken English. “I was trying to hold him. I don’t know what is going on when he told me they looking for him.”

Cruz released surveillance video shot inside the store, showing how he helped Guzman-Feliz over the counter where he briefly hid from his eventual killers.

Guzman-Feliz could be seen peering out in terror, before men can be seen beating and dragging him out of the store where he’s hacked to death.

“I remember his face. He was so scared and I tried to hold him down,” Cruz said.

Cruz, who says he has known the teen since he was “little,” recalled: “But [at] the same, the people that are following him are coming in through the same door.”

Cruz claimed, “We struggled with the guys who did this to stop them from removing him.”

Cruz’s lawyer, Francisco Serrano, said Cruz “tried to hide the kid” before the thugs stormed in and told the store owner, “Don’t get involved.”

The bodega owner claimed that as soon as the attackers dragged Guzman-Feliz out of the store, he made his first phone call to 911 at 11:39 p.m.

“I spend four minutes [on the phone] with the operator,” Cruz said. “I said, ‘Please, send the police.’ She took four minutes.”

Cruz says he made a second call to 911 at 11:46 p.m. “because I saw help wasn’t coming.”

Surveillance footage from inside the store shows the mortally wounded teen run back into the deli after the attack, and a worker can be seen motioning towards the door.

Serrano claims Cruz was the one motioning, but that he was doing so to show the teen the direction of nearby St. Barnabas Hospital.

Serrano said Cruz “did what was humanly possible to save the life of this kid . . . in my view he was a hero. He attempted to save the kid. They would have been killed themselves.”

An emotional Cruz said when he found out the night of the attack that Guzman-Feliz had been killed, “it was so hard.”

I remember [Lesandro ‘Junior’ Guzman-Feliz’s] face. He was so scared . . . We struggled with the guys who did this to stop them. — Modesto Cruz, owner of bodega where memorial candles have multiplied