The city’s first murder of a green-cab driver remained unsolved Wednesday, as a Bronx judge cleared the man charged in the fatal 2015 robbery.
“Thank God, thank God,” Nicholas Sanchez, 26, said he thought to himself as he walked out of a Bronx courthouse a free man after more nearly 2 ¹/₂ years in custody.
Sanchez had maintained since his arrest that he’d been nowhere near the shooting of Mamadou Barry, the father-of-three found dead in his cab at East 189th Street and Beaumont Avenue in Fordham.
“He has a gun,” Barry had whispered into his phone to his brother in law, moments before he was shot.
“I found the People have not met their burden of proof,” Bronx Supreme Court Justice Martin Marcus said in acquitting Sanchez.
“I find the defendant not guilty,” said the judge, who presided over the non-jury trial.
“I had people behind me,” Sanchez said after walking free. “I had people praying for me. Everything just worked out.”
Prosecutors declined to comment on the acquittal, which Sanchez’s lawyer attributed to a lack of evidence, beyond a very flawed lineup identification.
“That eyewitness in this case, he identified someone else, not Mr. Sanchez, in the lineup,” Smith told The Post.
“Two and a half years, we didn’t learn about this information. The police paperwork to this day doesn’t show that he identified anybody else other than Mr. Sanchez, and that’s a huge problem.”
Sanchez would cry inconsolably in asserting his innocence at their earliest meetings, the lawyer recalled — and he believed him.
The acquittal came as a blow to the cabbie’s family members.
Barry’s brother, Mamadou Faido Barry, said by phone that he was “shocked” by the verdict — though he conceded that prosecutors had told him there was a lack of evidence against Sanchez.
“One day, God is going to judge the person who killed my brother,” he told The Post.
“If it is Sanchez, God is going to judge Sanchez.”
As he walked outside, Sanchez said he was looking forward to breathing the fresh air, enjoying a good restaurant meal and especially hugging his eight-year-old son.
“That’s like opening a new present — me seeing him,” Sanchez said of of the child.
“I’m going to hug him and kiss him, everything. I am going to do a lot of things with him.
“Two years,” Sanchez added. “A lot of things have passed by.”
He’ll avoid green cabs, though.
“I’m going to take a yellow cab home,” Sanchez said with a laugh. “I don’t want to see a green cab at all.”
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton, Max Jaeger and Laura Italiano