The grief-stricken family of the construction worker fatally mowed down during an road-rage scuffle in Manhattan said Thursday they’re in disbelief — telling The Post the calm, beloved dad couldn’t have been capable of such a violent confrontation.
“This does not make any sense,” Alex Garcia, 54, said of her husband of 28 years, Robert Velez Alvarez, who was killed Wednesday afternoon during the clash on the Upper East Side.
“He’s a great person, a great husband, a great father,” Garcia said. “Everybody loves him.”
Police said Velez Alvarez, 54, and another driver, Andre Mosby, 26, got into a feud after Mosby tapped the back of Velez Alvarez’s 2020 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck with his 2014 Volkswagen Jetta at East 60th Street, near Park Avenue.
As the dispute heated up, Velez Alvarez got out of his truck and slashed Mosby’s tires, according to police. Mosby then allegedly slammed the accelerator on his Jetta and plowed into the older man.
But Velez Alvarez’s wife said she can’t imagine that her husband would have slashed the other man’s tires.
“He eats oranges or apples in the car when he gets hungry. He peels the orange and cuts the apple with the small pocket knife. That’s the only knife I know,” she said from the family’s home in Franklin Square, Nassau County.
“I can’t see this,” Garcia said. “When they tell me I say, ‘That’s not my husband! That’s not the man I’ve been married to for 28 years. Ask his friends, his family, his boss, his neighbors. Everyone will tell you the same.”
Velez Alvarez, a construction supervisor originally from Colombia was rushed to Cornell Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. Mosby — who police sources said is claiming self-defense — was charged with manslaughter.
The victim’s son said even his dad’s boss thought he was joking when he relayed the police account.
“I never saw him yell,” Steven Velez Garcia, 25, told The Post. “I worked with him. My uncle worked with him. He never yelled. The harshest thing I ever said when I worked with him, I heard him say, ‘This is not something to do.”