This guy just keeps dodging bullets.
The so-called “Swiss Cheese Man” was today cleared by a grand jury of all charges in a Harlem police shootout that left him riddled with 26 bullet wounds.
Angel Alvarez, who still has bullets lodged in his ribs, shoulder and back, walked out of Manhattan Supreme Court a free man, with his three-year-old son Angel in his arms.
“I’m alive, I’m free, I’m happy!” Alvarez said, beaming, as he left court with a crowd of cheering relatives and friends.
“They didn’t even think I was going to be able to walk,” Alvarez said.
The lucky man has insisted since the August melee at a Lenox Avenue block party that he’d never shot at the cops.
He wasn’t even guilty of gun possession, he’d argued, since he’d been unarmed until grabbing the .38-caliber 5-shot revolver of his rival, Luis Soto, in self-defense.
Cops shot at him with no reason, he’d argued though his lawyer, Matthew Galluzzo.
Cops had countered in pre-trial hearings that they opened fire on Alvarez only after he pointed the revolver their way
In voting to clear Alvarez of all charges after hearing his testimony, grand jurors rejected the police account and extended Alvarez’s lucky streak.
“The grand jury — the people of the city — considered all the evidence and found the truth,” said another of Alvarez’s lawyers, Zachary Johnson.
The same grand jury has yet to vote on the fate of the police officers who fired their weapons in the shootout.
Soto, died of a police bullet, cops said. Four other bystanders were injured by gunshots, and one police officer was injured by a bullet fired by another cop.