Metro

Witnesses call father’s assault rifle attack on rowdy teens ‘better than HBO’

The violence was happening live, right in front of them, not on TV — and witnesses who saw the carnage after a Brooklyn dad fired an assault rifle from his window onto a crowd of rowdy teens said the fighting was “better than HBO,” a defense lawyer said in openings of the attempted murder trial today.

Prosecutors say Thomas Dunikowski, 32, aimed directly at the teens with his AR-15 and kept shooting until he hit one in the neck, while the defense maintains he only fired in self-defense.

“The evidence will show that the defendant took his Bushmaster rifle and from the safety of his second-floor window fired 27 shots directly at a group of rowdy teenagers,” said assistant district attorney John Sharples in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

“He was aiming directly at them. They could feel the bullets whizzing by them and they could feel the fragments of asphalt and bullets hitting them.”

Neighbors who filmed the fighting that led to the shooting can be heard saying, “Grab a chair, this is better than HBO,” and “It’s Brooklyn. If this was Long Island there would be six cop cars here already” on the video, defense attorney Jay Schwitzman told jurors, making the case that the neighborhood was dangerous and police presence was scarce. The video is expected to be introduced as evidence during the trial.

Prosecutors said the conflict started after the teens – who had been drinking and smoking marijuana – threw a beer can into the Marine Park yard of Dunikowski’s neighbor and that the conflict escalated after Dunikowski punched one of the teens.

Dunikowski defense attorney Jay Schwitzman said his client fired at the teens in self-defense to protect his wife and two-year-old son.

“[The teens] were here to do battle. They wanted street justice and they called their biggest fighters and they armed themselves,” Schwitzman said. “He fires at the front of his house to get those kids out of there.”

Schwitzman also said that Dunikowski bought the Bushmaster – the same type of gun used in the Newtown school shootings – in Long Island and that the gun store fit a pin into the stock of the rifle so that it wasn’t technically considered an assault rifle.

Dunikowski neighbor Michael Bonade, 36, testified today that when the shooting happened he looked up and saw a rifle sticking out of the second-floor window of the Dunikowski home.

jsaul@nypost.com