The biker who was paralyzed when a terrified dad sped away from a pack of menacing motorcyclists who had surrounded his family’s SUV on the West Side Highway said Wednesday he can’t fault the man who ran him over.
“I don’t blame him. Because at the end of the day, I’m not him to know what was going through his mind,” Edwin Mieses said on the “Today” show.
Mieses, 32, who is paralyzed from the waist down, insisted he meant no harm as he got off his bike and stalked toward a Range Rover driven by Alexien Lien, 33, who was out for a Sunday drive with his wife and toddler daughter Sept. 29 when they were surrounded by scores of bikers.
“I was fully conscious for the whole entire thing,’’ he said.
“I got off my bike to check on [another biker]. As soon as I saw that it wasn’t that serious, I was just telling guys to keep going because I didn’t really want to ruin the ride and besides that, we were in the middle of the highway,” he said.
“As soon as I turned around and started walking back towards my bike, that’s when I got ran over. As soon as he hit me, I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to open my eyes because I knew that he had hurt me,” Mieses told “Today’s” Savannah Guthrie.
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He said a young woman at the scene doused him with water to keep him conscious.
“She was like an angel,’’ he said. “She kept throwing water on my face to keep me awake. I was just like so aggravated that she was throwing water in my face. I was awake because I was aggravated.”
Mieses said he heard about the ride on the Internet and came down from Massachusetts with three pals for fun.
But he wound up with two broken legs and spinal injuries after Lien struck him while trying to escape from the menacing gang, which pursued him from Harlem to West 178th Street and then yanked him from his car and beat him as his horrified family looked on.
Lien’s wife, Rosalyn Ng, called 911 four times during the chase and subsequent attack, but it was bystanders who finally rescued the family from the attackers.
Charges against 10 bikers arrested for the attack won’t be downgraded because the Lien’s injuries haven’t healed as expected, a Manhattan prosecutors told a judge Friday.
The bloody confrontation was caught on video and went viral on the Internet.