'LAW LESS FREE-FOR-ALL’
I halted 'fiend's attack-then city bailed him out
A good Samaritan is outraged because he risked his life to save a mom and her kids from a violent pervert in Hudson River Park — only to learn that the suspect was quickly released without bail.
“It’s basically a lawless free-for-all,” Denis Goncharov lamented of New York City, after finding out that the suspect will remain free until a December court date.
“Like in the movie ‘Joker,’ ” he told The Post.
As a dad of two grade-schoolage girls , Goncharov, 33, says he didn’t think twice about leaping between a terrified family and a deranged man who had walked up to their park bench last week and started masturbating.
Goncharov chased the creep for more than a half-mile through Greenwich Village to help cops catch him, even after the still-exposed man picked up a brick from the ground and ran at his head with it.
“What upsets me is the kids he was exposing himself to were a similar age to my daugh- ters,” Goncharov said.
“I imagined the kids being harassed were my own.”
It was Sept. 8, a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Goncharov — who lives in Westchester and works in finance in Manhattan — was eating his lunch on a park bench near Pier 45 off Christopher Street when he saw the man leave the nearby public restroom, pants open. Police later identified the suspect as Justin Merritt, 34.
Merritt has a long misdemeanor rap sheet — mostly for criminal possession of stolen property, trespassing and turnstile jumping, but with at least one aggravated-harassment arrest thrown in, lawenforcement sources said.
He allegedly walked straight over to the mom and her two kids.
“From my recollection, it was a boy and a girl, aged around 7 to 10,” Goncharov recalled.
“They were sitting on the bench and looked very scared. They were a similar age to my own kids, who were fortunately back home at this time.”
The man “started to touch himself in a sexual way, and was by that point approximately six, seven feet from the scared woman, who was attempting to cover [her kids’] eyes.”
Goncharov, yelling, jumped up from his own bench about 20 feet away.
“My dad instinct kicked in,” he said.
“I tried to form a human barrier by jumping in between,” he said. “At this point, he backed off from the family and focused his attention on me.” As the mother called 911, Goncharov and the man squared off.
“He was right up close to me in a very confrontational and menacing way,” Goncharov said.
“In self-defense, I was forced to push him away from me.
“At that point, he — unsuccessfully — tried to spit on me and called me ‘white trash.’ ”
Merritt then allegedly picked up a brick and lunged, “aiming for my head,” according to Goncharov and prosecutors.
Goncharov ducked, then grabbed an orange traffic cone — more of a shield than a weapon, but it was all he could find, he said.
“Nobody else attempted to intervene,” he said, although he saw “a few people backing away and timidly filming the scene on their iPhones.”
When his adversary took off, pants still open, Goncharov followed and called 911.
Police caught up to Merritt at 8 p.m., and after a night in jail, he was charged with lewdness, harassment, menacing and criminal possession of a weapon — the brick.
All four are nonviolent misdemeanors. Under state bail reforms in effect since January, none of the charges is eligible for bail.
At Merritt’s arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court the next day, he was assigned a lawyer from the New York County Defender Services, and a judge released him on his own recognizance.
“I felt sorry for the hardworking NYPD officers who often feel so powerless,” Goncharov said. “The law is completely letting down innocent, lawabiding citizens. Shootings, burglaries and violent crime are off the charts — and is it any wonder?”