A Manhattan grand jury has begun to hear evidence against the bloodthirsty bikers accused of terrorizing a family on the West Side Highway, according to lawyers connected to the case.
The jury’s first order of business? Voting, by day’s end, on charges against the first biker to be accused of felony gang assault in the shocking, caught-on-video attack.
If grand jurors fail to indict by day’s end, that biker — Robert Sims, 35, of Brooklyn — must by law be released from jail. Sims, accused of stomping on victim Alexian Lien’s head with his sneakers-clad feet, is being held in lieu of $100,000 bail.
The grand jury will continue its work Friday, when it is due to vote on a total.
That includes disgraced NYPD undercover detective Wojciech Braszczok, who will take the stand in his own defense, his lawyer says.
Braszczok was caught on video helping to bash in the tinted rear window of Lien’s Range Rover — just inches away from where Lien’s 2-year-old daughter cowered in her car seat, prosecutors have said.
The cop’s lawyer is insisting that Braszczok, who is charged with gang assault, never came near Lien or his family, and committed a misdemeanor at most by busting up a window that was already broken.
“They expect the grand jury to act [on Sims] sometime today,” Sims lawyer Luther Williams told reporters.
Police had initially told Sims that he was just a witness, and Sims had been cooperating under that pretext before they turned around and busted him, using his information against him, the lawyer said.
Sims’ main role in the melee was to help a fellow motorcyclist, Edwin Jay Mieses, 26, who’d been run over by Lien, the lawyer added.
“My client primarily assisted with Mr. Mieses, the young man who got run over who we all seem to be forgetting,” the lawyer said.
The incident began when Lien accidentally rear-ended one motorcycle, was surrounded by angry bikers, and ran over Mieses as he fled the seething mob.
“My client assisted him because the man was drowning in his own blood. He put him in a position where he could breathe and stop the gurgling,” the lawyer said.
The latest biker to be busted, James Shawn Kuehne, 31, of Broooklyn, is awaiting arraignment for allegedly smashing Lien’s car with his helmet and joining in punching and kicking the fallen dad.