He crashed again — this time on the witness stand.
A cabby accused of ramming his taxi into two men rather than drive them from Midtown to The Bronx turned his trial into his own personal smash-up derby yesterday — taking the stand to insist that his victims were “violent” and “racist” and had merely “rolled off” the hood of his cab after jumping there.
Jurors in the Manhattan Supreme Court attempted-murder trial smiled and rolled their eyes as Mohammed Azam careened through a brutal cross-examination.
“You’ve heard all the doctors’ testimony,” prosecutor Gregory SanGermano asked Azam, referring to a doctor’s description of the fractured skull and bruised, bleeding brain of victim Anthony Loreto, 24.
Azam has insisted that he saw both victims still standing on West 54th Street and Eighth Avenue as he drove away after the near-deadly argument over a trip to Throggs Neck.
“Is it still your testimony that you saw Anthony Loreto stand up in front of your cab after you claim he gently rolled off your hood?” the prosecutor asked Azam, who was in his fourth year at an Aruba-based medical school.
“I could have made a mistake,” Azam, a naturalized citizen, conceded in his Bangladeshi accent.
“It was a shocking, traumatic event,” he told jurors. “As I said, I thought they were OK.”
“If you knew they were hurt, you would help them?” the prosecutor asked, a tinge of sarcasm in the question.
“Of course!” Azam said.
Azam also insisted that he never hit the gas after the two men “jumped” onto his hood. Instead, his cab “rolled forward.”
“The car had the speed without even pressing the gas or anything,” Azam insisted.
A few jurors smiled when the prosecutor confronted Azam on why he looped down Broadway and then back past the scene rather than go straight back to his Astoria, Queens, taxi depot.
He claimed he wanted to “clear his head,” leading SanGermano to ask if there was anything “magical” about Broadway that clears anyone’s head.