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School bus driver charged in 1990 slay of ex-lover: ‘I was in the wrong place at the wrong time’

Sobbing inside a visiting booth at Rikers, Rhode Island school-bus driver Zunilda Rosario appears stunned and out of place.

Her gray, jail-issued uniform hangs loose on her narrow frame. A second night in jail has left her reddish-brown curls limp, and her eyes weary.

Has this tired, weepy, middle-aged woman — a mom who bakes wedding cakes for extra cash — been living for 26 years with blood on her hands?

In an exclusive interview Saturday with The Post, Rosario — accused of firing nine bullets into her baby daddy in Harlem in 1990 — insisted she is neither murderess nor fugitive.

“I was supposed to bake a cake for a wedding today,” Rosario, 48, said through tears.

“I wasn’t hiding,” she insisted of the past quarter-century.

“I was there [in Manhattan] for four years” after the slaying before moving to Providence, RI, with her two grade-school kids, victim Juan Deleon’s little girls.

“They [police] knew where I lived,” she said.

But 1990 was the height of the city’s crack plague, and the NYPD was struggling against a backlog of hundreds of homicides — a rising tide of unavenged blood.

Deleon, a known dealer, was one of 55 people killed in his Harlem precinct that year, a precinct where no murders have been reported so far this year, NYPD data show.

“Back then, the neighborhood, specifically that block, was off the hook,” said a law-enforcement source familiar with the murder.

“So much so that it was hard for the detectives to pay attention to any one murder because of the constant flow of violence.”

It took busy cops two days to ask Rosario about the Feb. 11 murder in the lobby of 510 W. 150th St., the complaint against her shows.

She told police then that she had been there, in the lobby, when a gunman opened fire, killing Deleon.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said Saturday.

Rosario had been arguing with Deleon right before his murder, berating him for missing one daughter’s birthday party.

“He never did anything for them,” she said Saturday, still sounding bitter.

“We had the party at his mother’s house — he didn’t come. I went to go ask him why he isn’t there for his daughter.”

Then at least two men entered the lobby, she claimed Saturday.

“They didn’t come at me — they went straight for him,” she said.

“They started shooting. I ran away.”

After telling her story to cops, “They took my fingerprints and told me to go home,” Rosario said.

Rhode Island home of Zunilda Rosario, 48, who is in custody and charged with the 1990 murder of Juan Deleon, 19.Josh Reynolds

It took more than a quarter-century for a key witness to come forward, claiming he had heard Rosario and Deleon arguing through the door of a ground-floor apartment he shared with Deleon.

He also saw Rosario there with Deleon via a security camera attached to a monitor in his apartment, the witness told cops.

Then he heard gunfire.

This witness was a drug “associate” of Deleon’s, according to the law-enforcement source — possibly explaining the 26-year lag in his telling his story.

Cold-case cops soon found a second person who was behind the door with the first witness. Then they found two more witnesses to say Rosario and Deleon fought violently and constantly.

Rosario “had told Informant #3 that [she] would kill Juan Deleon, the other female and the child,” her murder complaint says.

But Rosario railed on Saturday, “Who are these four witnesses?”

“Why now? Why not say something then?”

‘Why would I do that?…I’m not a bad person. I would never do anything like that.’

 - Zunilda Rosario, in an exclusive interview with The Post from Rikers Island

By the time all four witnesses gave cops their story this year, the two daughters, Denise, 28, and Jovelyn, 27, were grown, and Rosario was driving a school bus and baking wedding cakes for extra cash.

Cops drove to Providence last week to arrest Rosario, but were told she was in the Dominican Republic.

Detectives were waiting for her Thursday when she got off a plane at JFK Airport.

“You have to leave us alone,” a woman who wouldn’t give her name told a Post reporter at Rosario’s Providence address.

The murder rap shocked Rosario’s neighbors.

“She was always walking, parking and cleaning the bus” on the street, a neighbor said. “Oh, my God, I can’t believe it.”

Rosario says neither can she.

“Why would I do that?” Rosario said. “That was my babies’ daddy. I’m not a bad person. I would never do anything like that.”

Additional reporting by Jamie ­Schram, Joe Marino, and Laura Italiano