Khaika Malakov hunched forward on the witness stand and sighed deeply, as if in mourning, as he recounted his last moments with his son.
Testifying in Queens Supreme Court yesterday, Malakov, 68, said that 15 minutes after his son Daniel left his Forest Hills home, he received a call that something had happened to the 34-year-old dentist.
The father said he then rushed to Daniel’s office a few blocks away.
“It was difficult for me to walk,” the Uzbek immigrant recalled through an interpreter at the murder trial of his son’s wife.
“I was afraid of something, so my legs were letting me down.”
Daniel’s secretary was waiting outside.
“I asked, ‘Is he alive?’ ” the elderly man said.
“She said, ‘I don’t know.’
Khaika said he asked, “Where?” and she pointed to the park down the street.
“I started screaming,” he said. “I recently lost my daughter [Stella, to blood cancer in 1996]. Why is my destiny that way?”
Khaika said he rushed to the spot where his son was lying on the sidewalk with three bullet holes in his chest and back.
The dad, who had been a doctor, went up to cops and said, “Let me reach to my son. Maybe I can still help him.”
The cops would not let him go near Daniel because paramedics were working on him.
“I continued moaning and screaming,” Khaika recalled. “How could it happen like that?”
Daniel had gone to the park on Oct. 28, 2007, to deliver his daughter, then 4, to his estranged wife, Mazoltov Borukhova, because he had to work.
Prosecutors say Borukhova, 35, who was embroiled in a custody battle with Daniel, lured him to the park so that Mikhail Mallayev, a distant relative whom she hired as a hit man, could kill him using a silencer fashioned from a bleach bottle.
Jurors cringed when they saw photos of Malakov on a gurney atop a blood-soaked sheet.
On the witness stand, Khaika said that on the morning of Daniel’s death, his son showed up at his home with Michelle.
“She was very happy,” he said.
Khaika said Daniel asked him to take what would be the last picture of him and his daughter.