He got home from work anticipating a quiet evening with his fiancée, but instead found his 86-year-old grandfather waiting with a gun.
“I opened the door and that was it,” Michael Feliciano, 47, told the Daily News.
Feliciano, a Staten Island electrician, lay in a hospital bed on Saturday. It was the day after Heriberto Pagan, the octogenarian, whipped out a revolver and blasted him in the face.
Police say Pagan shot and killed Feliciano’s longtime girlfriend, Claritle Huerta about 6:15 p.m. Friday. The gunman later turned the weapon on himself, ending his rampage with a bullet to his head.
Feliciano, tears in his eyes and a bandage over his right cheek, spoke to Huerta on the phone minutes before all hell broke loose. She told him that Pagan was at the house on Virginia Ave. in Rosebank.
“She called me and told me that he was there and he wanted to talk to me,” Feliciano told The News in an exclusive interview. “I said, ‘I just got off the bus. I’ll be right there. I love you.'”
The bloodthirsty grandpa was angry over the slow pace of eviction proceedings initiated against Feliciano. He wanted the grandson and Huerta, whom Feliciano called his wife, out of the house.
Taking matters into his hands, Pagan fatally shot 28-year-old Huerta in the head. Feliciano ran from the house, but the grandfather still managed to shoot him in the face. The gunman got into a red Mitsubishi Galant and drove a few blocks away to Clifton Ave. The Brooklyn man stepped out of the car and killed himself.
After the shooting, Feliciano and his fiancée were rushed to Staten Island University Hospital North, where she died.
Feliciano struggled on Saturday to relay the details of the deadly drama. Tears welled up in his eyes when he talked about his longtime love.
“She gave me the love that I’m never going to get back from anybody,” he said.
They met three years ago in rehab. He was first attracted to her smile.
“That smile just melted me,” he said. “She was the perfect woman for me.”
The couple’s 4-month-old son was in the home where his mother was killed. He wasn’t injured.
Pagan’s 69-year-old daughter owns the home the couple was living in, but she suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and moved back to Puerto Rico. The gun-toting grandfather was concerned that Feliciano was taking advantage of her, who is the wounded man’s mother.
“They were manipulating my mother,” Feliciano said of his grandfather and other relatives who wanted him out. “Telling her the right thing to do was to kick us out on the street.”
A judge had recently approved her push to evict the couple, a source said, but the marshal has yet to receive the notice of eviction.
Feliciano has multiple drug arrests on his record, police said, and his grandfather couldn’t accept that he had turned his life around. “He wouldn’t let go of the past,” Feliciano said of his grandfather’s reaction to his checkered past. “He’s not one to forget.”
Feliciano said he will raise their son with help from Huerta’s relatives.
“I will find a way to keep her memories alive,” he vowed.
Cops were called to the Rosebank home twice for domestic disturbances, once in April 2013 and once in May 2011. No arrests were made. Pagan fought with his grandson whenever he visited the home, neighbors said.
“It was just yelling and shouting,” said John Reina. “Whenever they got together.”
With Thomas Tracy and Joseph Stepansky
