Beaten, mocked and tormented by classmates, Noel Estevez begged to escape his middle-school nightmare — but in the end, he felt the only way out was at the point of a knife.
The abuse got so bad that the Bronx teen told his family, “I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die. I can feel it,” and begged them to get him out of IS 117, sources told The Post.
“He told his father, ‘I don’t want to go to school because they are going to kill me,’ ” said Marisol Perez, a family friend of 14-year-old Noel, who has been charged with murder in the stabbing of one of his tormentors, classmate Timothy Crump, also 14.
“His father said, ‘Don’t worry,’” added Perez. “His father went to school on Tuesday and spoke to the principal and told him everything that’s going on.”
What was going on was a campaign of bullying by neighborhood kids led by Timothy.
They called his mom a “whore,” mocked Noel’s stutter and even peed on his family’s apartment door.
Tormented, the teen had tried to hang himself in May.
Noel’s father, Felix, a street-cart ice-cream salesman, made the request for the emergency transfer Tuesday — but was denied because the school year was about to end, Perez said.
The next day, the family’s worst fears came true, when Noel was jumped in the schoolyard after class by Timothy, a bully who had been suspended for attacking another student at the school.
Fearing for his life, Noel allegedly killed Timothy with a 6-inch kitchen knife, allegedly stabbing him three times.
But questions remain over what sparked the fatal attack.
“The school failed, police failed. Everyone failed — the kid was crying out for help. He never should’ve never been back at that school,” Perez said.
The trouble that led to bloodshed started in March, when Timothy loaned Noel a cellphone.
The boys had been good friends. But that changed when Timothy asked for the phone back and Noel had to admit that his mom had found it and thrown it down a garbage chute, law-enforcement sources said.
The sources said the woman, a drug addict who is currently incarcerated, was terrified of the phone because she thought cops could track it.
Enraged at the loss, Timothy and his crew began targeting Noel, the sources said.
“It was constant bullying for three months,” said family friend Milagros Arroyo, 25. “That’s what drove him to this.”
“They would come up and write on his door. They would throw rocks at the window. They would threaten him all the time,” she added. “He was afraid to go to school because he said they were going to hurt him.”
Neighbor Erica Jones witnessed some of the cruelty and said the name-calling was constant.
“They called him ‘Stutter Box,’ and other names I don’t even want to say,” Jones said.
“They broke his apartment door. He’s constantly running and being chased,” she recalled. “They knocked him down the stairs. They grabbed him in school and cut his hair. They would taunt him.”
Jorge Guerrero, 47, a porter in Noel’s building, said the problems escalated when Timothy and several other teens urinated on the family’s door on a regular basis.
“It happened six or seven times in the last three weeks,” he said. “We had to clean up his door.”
“He told a neighbor that he was too scared to go outside,” Guerrero added. “They would chase him into the building, and he would run into friends’ apartments.”
The troubled teen — shy from a stutter — was already suffering depression since the death of his brother, Justin, in 2012.
The bullying got so bad that on May 28, a little more than a year after his brother’s death, Noel tried to kill himself by wrapping a belt around a bar in his bedroom closet and hanging himself.
His father found him dangling and saved his life.
He had been released last week from Bronx Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a mood disorder.
After his father’s attempt to get him out of class failed, he was forced to return to school on Tuesday.
He was so afraid that he brought a pipe with him for protection, police sources said.
“Noel was really scared about what Timothy was going to do to him,” said Yandry Escoto, 16.
“[Timothy would] say, ‘I’m gonna fight you’ or ‘I’m gonna jump you’ if he didn’t get his money.”
“[Noel’s] a lonely kind of a kid. He was kind of weird,” she added. “It’s hard to imagine he did this because he didn’t seem the type.”
On Wednesday, he made the fateful decision to upgrade his protection by bringing a 6-inch knife from this kitchen.
Shortly after the 3 p.m. bell rang, Timothy, who had been waiting with some cronies, spotted Noel coming out of the school.
“The victim was definitely the aggressor,” a law-enforcement source said.
The bully walked right up to Noel and punched him in the face.
This time, however, Noel allegedly pulled out his knife and stabbed the other 14-year-old in the chest.
Noel was grabbed almost immediately by a school safety agent and arrested.
He was arraigned Thursday night and hit with manslaughter and murder as a juvenile.
He was remanded after his lawyer, Eric Poulos, said the accused killer was really the one who “lived in fear.”
Poulos also spoke of the bullying nightmare Noel endured, saying the other kids “sicced on him like a pack of wolves.”
“My client is 14, and he has history of being bullied by the deceased and friends of his,” he said.
“He and his mother sought various ways through the school system and Police Department to stop this, but nobody would help.”
He claimed Timothy also used a weapon in the Wednesday fight.
“The day of the incident, the deceased hit my client five or six times, punched him in the nose and he also had a weapon of some kind on him. It was something like a screwdriver.”
“The deceased on numerous occasions has provoked and bullied my client, and he defended himself.
“It’s unreasonable for him to be charged with murder. He was defending himself, and people have a right to defend themselves from bodily attack.”
Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña said she had been up all night tossing and turning.
“I’m devastated,” she said. “I sleep pretty well at night. I haven’t slept well since last night.”
“This is a tragedy,” the chancellor added. “We are getting information as we speak, but the reality is this is something that shouldn’t happen. It’s something that shouldn’t happen to 14-year-olds.”
Perez, the family friend, said Noel had been suffering from depression ever since his older brother, Justin, died of a drug overdose.
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario, Erin Calabrese, Reuven Fenton and Dan Prendergast