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LIFE AND DEATH: Staten Island cops take Brian McGurk (right) to court yesterday. He’s accused of the hit-and-run killing of Clara Almazo (upper right), who pushed grandson Brian (upper left), 8, from harm’s way before being hit. (STEVE WHITE)
A Staten Island mail carrier surrendered to cops yesterday in the hit-and-run death of a hero grandmother who pushed her young grandson to safety before she was blasted by his SUV.
Brian McGurk, 40, an expectant dad who sported a hoodie and overgrown goatee, was charged with fleeing the scene of Thursday’s accident and held on $50,000 bond.
While he was in court, his black Ford Escape SUV sat in his driveway — its hood badly dented from smashing into the body of 57-year-old Clara Almazo.
“I thought it was two cars hitting each other — it was that loud,” said Janet Romero of the horrific crash that she heard from inside her house around 10 p.m. in West Brighton.
Romero said she bolted outside to find the Almazo’s daughter, Berta, and Berta’s 8-year-old son Brian in hysterics.
The three had been walking home from a Holy Thursday Catholic church service when McGurk’s SUV came bearing down on them, just feet from Almazo’s house.
Witnesses said Almazo pushed Brian — one of her 10 grandchildren — out of the way seconds before the SUV slammed into her at Cary Avenue and Elizabeth Street.
After the crash, Berta “laid him down here on the ground, and she was screaming, ‘My mother, my mother!’ ” Romero recalled.
“I asked her where her mom was, and she said, ‘Over there, over there!’”
She found Almazo’s body 150 feet from the point where Almazo was struck.
“She was face up. Her leg was broken at the knee,” said Romero, weeping at the memory.
“I recognized who she was, and I told her, ‘Wake up, wake up, please wake up!’ ”
“When I looked at her eyes, I knew she was gone,” Romero said.
So was the SUV’s driver, who had sped away right after hitting the Mexican-born immigrant.
When police arrived, Romero showed them a video of the crash that had been caught by surveillance cameras around her home.
“The cops were shocked when they watched the video in my house,” Romero said.
“They gasped at the impact. It was terrible.”
Hours later, McGurk turned himself in to cops. Police sources said there was no indication he’d been drinking.
Almazo’s son, Emilio Herrera, said angrily about McGurk, “He’s a criminal. He has taken the heart out of our family.”
“She loved all of us with her whole heart,” said Herrera, whose family retained a lawyer yesterday for a likely lawsuit against McGurk.
His uncle, Almazo’s brother Odilon Almazo, said of McGurk, “He needs to pay for what he did.”
In 2009, McGurk exposed his “disabled” wife’s secret life as a belly dancer during a trial in which she claimed she couldn’t work and rarely left the house due to injuries from a car accident.
McGurk’s wife Dorothy was seeking lifetime alimony of $850 a month from her estranged husband. The judge denied Dorothy’s request, instead awarding her $400 a month for two years.
Brian McGurk also got 60 percent from the sale of their house and thousands in legal fees for her “dilatory tactics.”
Almazo’s grandson was still in Richmond University Hospital yesterday with a badly bruised leg and other injuries, according to his mom, Berta, who could barely speak through her tears.