New pain for vic’s family Decries short sentence as man paralyzed in ’84 shoot dies

For his family, Marvin Williams’ life all but ended in 1984, when the 21-year-old was paralyzed in a Coney Island shooting.

Williams spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair until he died Jan. 5 at age 58, opening fresh emotional wounds for relatives after they learned the case was ruled a homicide — and that the man convicted in the case served less than three years in prison.

“That’s it?” asked his sister, Ethel Williams, 63. “We didn’t know. He came back to the streets and he could’ve been walking by me and we would’ve never known. He pretty much took away my brother’s life. “I hope he didn’t hurt anyone else.” The convicted man, Albert George, 18 at the time of the Sept. 14, 1984, shooting, later served 19 more years behind bars for other gun convictions in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

It’s unclear where George is currently living — or whether the Brooklyn district attorney will consider a murder case against him in the wake of the medical examiner’s ruling that Williams’ death was a homicide from complications linked to his shooting.

The only eyewitness to the shooting died, so any future proceedings are unlikely, a law enforcement source said.

According to police, the 1984 shooting was set in motion when Williams (photo) snatched a chain off an ex-girlfriend’s neck — a piece of jewelry her new boyfriend had given her. Later, three men confronted Williams. George wasn’t the woman’s new boyfriend and his connection to the other men wasn’t clear.

Ethel Williams account.

“Someone came up pounding on the door like they were beating the crap out of it,” she said. “She said, ‘Your brother’s been shot.’ I ran out in nothing but a sheet. He was on the ground. I said, ‘Mama is on the way,’ and Marvin said, ‘Don’t touch me — my body is on fire.’ ”

“He laid there still,” she said. “He couldn’t move. EMS picked him up and put disputed the police [him] straight in the ambulance to Kings County Hospital.”

The shooting, she said, had nothing to do with any jewelry theft, but was payback for an earlier confrontation in which Williams punched out the father of his girlfriend’s child after finding out he had hit her. The sister said that woman was still seeing that man while dating Williams.

Later, Williams stepped outside his home — a W. 23rd St. building that’s part of the Carey Gardens housing project — and was on his way to buy ice cream with money their mother had given him when he stopped to talk with three friends, the sister said.

At that point, the gunman approached from behind.

“They saw that boy creeping up behind him, but they thought he was another of Marvin’s friends,” she said. “They didn’t think he was going to shoot him in the back. My brother was never the same.”

The victim, known in the neighborhood as “True,” was suddenly robbed of one of life’s simple pleasures: walking.

“He loved to walk,” the sister recalled. “Marvin will walk from one end of Brooklyn to the other.”

Instead, she added, his last years were spent in and out of hospitals. He had recently moved to Staten Island, where he lived with his brother until his death at Richmond University Medical Center.

At the time, his family didn’t make the connection between the shooting and his death.

“We didn’t know,” Ethel Williams said. “We thought he died of a heart attack.”