In the latest black eye for the FDNY, an off-duty firefighter assaulted a cop after getting into a dispute with another man outside a Staten Island bar early yesterday morning, police said.
Firefighter David Gonzalez, 23, assigned to Engine Co. 86 in Harlem, slugged the cop in the face and body as the officer tried to apprehend him following a chase, according to authorities.
The incident unfolded shortly before 4 a.m. outside the Beer Garden on Victory Boulevard near Manor Road in Castleton Corners.
A man, claiming that Gonzalez vandalized his car during a dispute, flagged down a passing cop car.
“I had a fight with this guy [Gonzalez] and he tried to break the window of my car,” the man told the two cops.
But before the cops could question Gonzalez, the firefighter fled the scene on foot, police said.
A foot chase ensued through several backyards. The pursuit ended when the cops apprehended Gonzalez in the backyard of a home on Sommers Lane, two blocks from the bar.
That’s when Gonzalez “punched one of the cops in the face and the body,” said a police spokeswoman.
But Gonzalez told The Post last night it was all a “big misunderstanding.”
He said he thought he was fleeing from a group of men with whom he’d been arguing.
“I didn’t know it was a cop,” he said outside his father’s home.
“I wouldn’t hit a cop. It was dark. It was a big misunderstanding. It really was.”
Gonzalez, a one-year FDNY veteran, has been charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and trespassing.