To his dying breath, Dr. Henry Bello saw himself as the one true victim — even as the linoleum floors of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital turned red with the blood of his victims.
“Why didn’t you help me out when I was in trouble?” Bello (right), 45, demanded as he pulled his assault rifle from his white lab coat and took aim at a doctor he felt had slighted him more than two years ago.
“Gun! Gun! Gun!” Dr. Roger Green yelled, fleeing as Bello fired and missed — the first salvo of Friday’s rampage, which left one dead and six wounded.
And as Bello continued firing throughout the 16th floor, aiming for the chest, head and abdomen of each victim, he called out the name of still another doctor, one he believed had barred his
path from hospital resident to New York-licensed physician.
Bello had been forced to resign as a family medicine doctor at the busy Bronx hospital in February 2015, and due to his own behavior.
He had been confrontational and was impossible to work with, according to multiple accounts.
“He was a hothead,” said one source. “He picked fights with his co-workers.”
One colleague accused him of sexual harassment, another said.
The hospital didn’t know the worst of it. In 2003, a woman accused him of grabbing her by the crotch and arms and dragging her.
Bello pleaded guilty to misdemeanor unlawful imprisonment in that attack and was sentenced to community service, a conviction hospital officials on Saturday said had not shown up on his record when they hired him.
“All the time, he was a problem,” said Bronx-Lebanon’s Dr. David Lazala, who helped train the Nigerian native who received his medical degree in the Dominican Republic.
At previous jobs, Bello blamed everyone but himself for any bad fortune. He had lost a radiology technician position at Metropolitan Hospital in 2012 after he mishandled medication.
“He took medication to the wrong floor and violated safety procedures,” recalled his former lawyer, David Wims.
Still, Bello could be charming.
“I was so impressed with him,” Wims told The Post. “We discussed the possibility of setting him up [on a date] with my assistant. I told her, ‘You should go out with him. He’s a doctor.’ ”
Two years after losing the Metropolitan position, Bello lost a pharmacy-technician job.
But it was losing his next job, the Bronx-Lebanon residency, that most rankled him.
In the months after leaving, he fired off threatening e-mails, texts and calls to former colleagues, law-enforcement sources said.
Bello would even tell his tale of “woe is me” at the Midtown homeless shelter where he lived for a time this year, always painting himself as a victim of others’ senseless vendettas.
“People were doing him wrong,” Tony Tompkins, 57, said of his neighbor at East 30th Street shelter. “Doing him dirty.”
Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones