One of them was “slightly pretty,” so the freelance film director decided to say hi.
Next thing he knew, he was encircled, beaten and knifed in the gut right there on a Greenwich Village sidewalk – by seven bloodthirsty young lesbians.
“The girls started coming out of nowhere,” Dwayne Buckle told a Manhattan jury yesterday, describing the bizarre beat-down he suffered last summer, allegedly at the hands of a seething sapphic septet from Newark, N.J.
“I felt like I was going to die.”
Buckle, 29, of Queens, took the stand in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday to admit he was defenseless and terrified after his simple “hello” spurred a predawn melee on Sixth Avenue at West 4th Street.
Three of the original seven women are currently serving six-month jail sentences for attempted assault. But four others are on trial on first-degree gang-assault charges that could get them anywhere from three to 25 years in prison.
The accused ringleader – Patreese Johnson, 20, whom Buckle called the “slightly pretty one” – is additionally charged with attempted murder for allegedly pulling a knife from her purse and slashing Buckle repeatedly, lacerating his liver and stomach.
The women, in turn, claim they were defending themselves against a violent, anti-gay bigot, and counter that Buckle provoked them as he sat outside the IFC Center movie theater trying to talk pedestrians into buying his latest movie.
When they rebuffed his advances – telling him he wasn’t their type – he began calling them “f- – -ing dykes,” they say. He then spat on them, threw a cigarette at them, and even grabbed one of them by the throat – which, like much of the melee, was caught on an IFC video security camera.
“I’ll f- – – you straight, sweetheart,” he told defendant Venice Brown, 19, before choking her, her lawyer, Michael Mays, told jurors.
Buckle told a different story on the stand, assigning many of his alleged attackers monikers.
There was Brown, the one he admittedly called an “elephant.” Then there was the one with the “low haircut,” do-rag and wife-beater T-shirt, whom he admittedly called “a man,” and the “slightly pretty” one to whom he first said hello.
It all started, he said, when the first two walked by. “They looked effeminate [sic] and one of them was slightly pretty, so I said ‘hi’ to them,” he said.
But the “heavier girl, she started to dog me out,” Buckle said.
“What does that, perchance, mean,” asked the judge, Justice Edward McLaughlin. “Just disrespect me,” Buckle explained. Then “more girls started coming out of nowhere.”
Buckle admitted he retaliated, telling the one with the “low haircut” that “she looks like a man.” He felt spit on the back of his neck, and spat back.
That’s when the women’s fists began flying. “I had my hands in the air in defense of their blows,” he said. Then “I felt like a nick in my abdomen. I didn’t know what happened.
“Everybody just jumped me,” he added, including three male passers-by recruited on the spot by the women. “It felt like it was 10, 20 people.” By the end, “I was messed up,” he said.