A city firefighter slashed in a boozy brawl outside a Brooklyn bar described for a jury today the horror of seeing his best pal getting pummeled by a group of men while blood gushed from his own arm.
“I was gushing. I was bleeding out,” Rosario Cicero said, describing how blood from his forearm arm sprayed a foot in the air each time his heart pulsed.
In often-monosyllabic testimony punctuated by grunts of “yep” and “nope,” the firefighter told jurors how he and Port Authority cop Ryan McCarthy downed pints of beer and shots of whiskey before the 3 a.m. mayhem erupted outside the Kettle Black bar.
Before the chaos spilled outside the Third Avenue bar, Cicero said he pounded two shots of Jameson’s whiskey with McCarthy and sucked down “maybe” 10 pints of beer.
“I don’t know, I don’t keep count,” he said. “I had a pretty high tolerance at that time.”
McCarthy suffered a broken jaw in the melee, which prosecutors say started when he came to the aid of another cop, an off-duty NYPD officer who had allegedly been whacked in the head with a bottle by John DeCarlo, 24.
“He was pretty much curled up in the fetal position,” Cicero said of his childhood pal. “There was probably like four or five people beating him up.”
Forced to choose between tangling with McCarthy’s alleged attackers or saving his own life, the gravely wounded firefighter tried to flag down an ambulance, according to testimony in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
A video played for jurors in the trial of the five men accused of assaulting Cicero and McCarthy shows the ambulance speeding to the bar and past the firefighter and a pair of lady friends.
Cicero, who was out of work for two months after the wild April 2010 rumble, grinned as he rolled up his sleeve and showed off his scar to jurors.
“I lost a lot of blood,” he said.
Decarlo and Dan Golden — a 25-year-old nephew of Brooklyn state Sen. Martin Golden — are accused of punching McCarthy in the jaw, while Cicero was allegedly cut by Kevin Crowley, 25, prosecutors say.
Crowley’s brother, Michael, 22, and friend Peter Jung, 25, are also charged in the beating.
Lawyers for the five defendants have said they were trying to escape the violence when they were pounced upon by an angry mob.
Arthur Aidala, a lawyer for Golden, has described the civil-service melee as a “typical Irish-American, Italian-American, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn bar brawl.”