The brute accused of killing a 44-year-old dad with a random knockout punch as he rode his bike in Brooklyn more than seven years ago was arrested and charged with manslaughter Wednesday, police said.
Gary Anderson, 34, was also charged with criminally negligent homicide in connection to the unprovoked June 8, 2017 Bedford-Stuyvesant attack that ultimately took Domingo D. Tapia’s life, cops said.
Tapia was riding on Fulton Street near the Kingston-Throop subway station around 1:30 a.m. when the bearded stranger suddenly socked him in his face, knocking him to the ground, according to cops.
Tapia, a married father of two, had suffered severe head trauma and was taken to Kings County Hospital, where he was placed in a medically-induced coma, according to authorities.
Anderson was initially arrested weeks after the attack and charged with third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, according to cops and a criminal complaint.
He pleaded guilty in 2019 to second-degree assault – a felony – and was sentenced to three years behind bars with the understanding that if the victim died, he would face additional charges, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.
He was released in May of 2022 on parole, which expired in November of 2023, State Corrections records show.
But then Tapia – who had already spent nearly seven years in a coma – died in March of 2024 – prompting the upgraded charges for Anderson, authorities said.
Anderson said nothing as detectives escorted him out of the 81st Precinct and into an awaiting unmarked police car Wednesday afternoon – but was greeted by the cheers and jeers of a group of schoolkids who looked on.
Anderson – who has at least 5 prior arrests, cops said – was awaiting arraignment on the new charges Wednesday evening.
The senseless attack came 10 days before Father’s Day, leaving Tapia’s wife, Esther Diaz struggling to tell the couple’s sons – who were 5 and 7 at the time – what had happened to their dad.
“I don’t know how to tell my children,” Diaz told The Post at the time, through sobs. “Father’s Day is this weekend, and their dad is not home, and I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
Tapia had arrived in the US from Mexico 18 years before the attack and worked at a fruit stand on Church Avenue.
He was the family’s only earner while his wife watched after the children for the summer, she said.
“All I want is that the person hand himself in — whoever did it … and to pay for what he did, because now my kids need a dad,” Diaz said in 2017 before Anderson was arrested.
The brazen attack came at the height of the disturbing and so-called “knockout game” — meant to slug strangers into unconsciousness — across the city and the country.
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