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A musclebound electrician who was arguing with a woman over a parking spot in the East Village punched the petite victim harder “than I’ve ever seen anyone get hit in my entire life,” an eyewitness told jurors yesterday at the beginning of the felony assault trial.
“It was almost like he punched her into the ground,” witness Elizabeth McWilliams said of the Feb. 25 confrontation between Oscar Fuller and Lana Rosas that left the 4-foot-11 Rosas in a coma.
“It made a huge, huge sound. The whole street gasped.”
Fuller, 31, of Queens, maintains he was just defending himself, and that Rosas had started hitting him when he tried to park in a spot on East 14th Street that she was holding for her friend.
Witnesses told jurors a very different story — that Fuller was raging at her for getting in his way before delivering the haymaker that left her bleeding on the concrete with a fractured skull.
Catherine Reilly testified that confrontation started when Fuller nearly ran Rosas over, hitting the brakes just inches from her body.
“He seemed to be in a rage. He was scary, like pumped up,” Reilly said.
McWilliams, 30, said she was on her way home when she heard a man screaming at somebody.
“The man seemed to be very aggressive and violent,” McWilliams said. “He was screaming at her, like he was trying to scare her or intimidate her.” She said she saw a man come running from up the street to Rosas’ aid, but “he didn’t shift his anger off the woman.”
“He leaned all the way back, and with all his body weight flew into the woman,” McWilliams said, adding that, “I was shocked. It didn’t have the normal escalation of an argument that leads to a physical fight. There was no middle ground . . . It’s the hardest punch I’ve seen in my life, ever.”
Rosas was in a coma for a week, and struggled after coming to, said her former boyfriend, Joseph Oliver. He said she suffered from memory loss and mood swings.
In a videotaped interview with cops that was played for the jury, Fuller said that Rosas had been slapping him.
“She hit me. She assaulted me. I just tapped her,” he said. “My thought wasn’t to hit her hard. It was just to hit her.” He maintained he didn’t know that she’d been injured, and told the cops who arrested him a few days later that he’d been planning on turning himself in — after his birthday that week.