If only someone had called cops, a life might have been saved.
A disgruntled hardhat stormed into a Manhattan construction site Thursday and gunned down the boss who had fired him — a revenge plot he blabbed about to neighbors for days — and then took his own life moments later.
Samuel Perry rushed into the Midtown construction site from which he’d been fired around 7:10 a.m. and shot foreman Christopher Sayers in the head at point-blank range on the 37th floor, police said.
He then fled to the fifth floor and turned the 9mm semi-automatic weapon on himself, cops said. His body was found more than an hour later.
Perry made no secret of his sick revenge plot. The disgruntled worker griped to friends and neighbors about the plan after Sayers, 37, of Farmingdale, canned him from the luxury high-rise development project on W. 59th St. near the West Side Highway.
“He’s been telling me. I was trying to talk him out of it. He got fired two days ago. It pushed him to his limits,” said Karinne Gale, 26, who lives next door to Perry in Far Rockaway.
The 44-year-old concrete layer promised Gale, “I’m going to take care of it. I’m over life. It’s time to go.”
Cops at Perry’s home told The Post that he also texted his brother, who’s in the military in Georgia, Thursday morning, indicating he was going to kill himself and his boss. That brother immediately called police.
“He told me he’s going to do it today. I tried to text him early this morning,” wept Gale, who admitted she didn’t alert police about the threats.
Perry even left behind a note where he complained about unfair treatment at the work site, sources said.
Colleagues described Perry as a “hothead,” according to police. He’d been arrested three times before, twice for assault and once for burglary. His last arrest was in 2015.
Construction at the site, which will become the ultra-luxe Waterline Square development set to open in 2019, was shut down for the day.
In another fateful sign, Perry tried to give his 13-month-old pit bull named Bruno away to another neighbor, named Mike, a day before the shootings.
“He told me wanted to shoot the dog and bury him in the yard. I told him don’t do that,” Mike said.
Perry’s murder-suicide comes two years after he witnessed his wife’s own gruesome death, according to neighbors, who said she doused herself with gasoline at their Queens home and set herself ablaze.
“He told me she did it in the middle of the night. She came into his room and was calling his name,” said Gale.
Law enforcement sources confirmed the neighbor’s account.
Additional reporting by Sarah Trefethen