ABOUT TO DIE
Image at trial amid killer’s new outrage
The moment that a gay man and his killer confronted each other on a Greenwich Village street was captured in this dramatic video shown Tuesday at the suspect’s trial — where the victim’s pal endured a torturous grilling by the gunman.
Right after Elliot Morales snarled, “What are you, gay wrestlers?” at Mark Carson and Danny Robinson, Morales whipped out a Taurus .38caliber gun and shot Carson in the face.
Morales — who is serving as his own lawyer at the trial in Manhattan Supreme Court — suggested to Robinson, who was on the witness stand, that the two men provoked the shooting.
“You could have avoided all of this from escalating to the level it did if you and Mr. Carson just went along with your own business?” asked Morales, 36, who had hurled antigay slurs at the strangers as they walked down Sixth Avenue on May 18, 2013.
“That is so offensive,” Robinson, 34, said, shaking his head as prosecutors objected.
“Sustained,” declared Justice Kirke Bartley.
After a drunken Morales asked the duo, “What are you, gay wrestlers?” and called them “fgots,” they turned around and confronted him, prosecutors say.
In the surveillance video, which has no audio, the men are seen outside a pizzeria.
When Morales walked around the corner onto Eighth Street, the two men followed and exchanged more words before Morales shot Carson, 32.
“Wouldn’t you agree, seeing this firearm and telling me to put it down, wouldn’t you consider that to be more instigating the whole situation?” Morales questioned Robinson.
“Instigating?” asked Robinson, incredulously. “Not at all.”
“You could have kept going?” asked Morales.
“Yeah, we could have easily kept going while we see a guy standing there with a gun,” Robinson said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Morales then played the 911 call where a blast clearly can be heard in the background, then Robinson saying, “Some guy just shot my friend!”
“I didn’t hear it,” Morales said in court of the gunshot, cueing the tape again. “Point it out to me.”
Robinson bowed his head and muttered, “Oh, my God” before complying.
Morales then tried to suggest that he pulled the trigger only when Robinson reached into his pocket for his phone.
“Is it possible what happened was a reaction to the threat that was put on my own life?” the defendant asked. “[When] you reached into your pocket and removed what I believed was a black gun at the time.”
As Robinson exited the courtroom, he wiped tears from his eyes.
Morales, charged with seconddegree murder as a hate crime, insisted that he’s not a bigot.