The heartbroken wife of a Queens man thrown to his death from the hood of a fleeing thief’s car demanded justice Thursday for the senseless death of “an excellent father.”
“They wanted to hurt him,” Marjorie Monserrate, 28, said of the crooks who broke into her husband Mauro Chimbay’s SUV in East Elmhurst Wednesday — and then sped off as he tried to stop them by jumping on top of the getaway car.
“There’s no justification for taking a human being like this,” she said in Spanish. “What I want most is justice.”
Chimbay, 43, a dad of two from Ecuador who moved to the US with his parents and siblings in 1995, was mortally injured when he was flung from the zooming white BMW, his head hitting the pavement.
“He was a very good person and an excellent father,” his grieving widow told The Post.
Chimbay, a restaurant worker, was playing volleyball with friends in Gorman Park on 85th Street and 25th Avenue at around 3:30 p.m. when he was told thieves were ransacking his Toyota Highlander.
One of the friends, Daniel Altamirano, 58, said the bandits stole a cardboard box from the back of Chimbay’s vehicle, prompting him to give chase.
Surveillance footage obtained by The Post shows Chimbay jumping onto the hood of the thieves’ BMW and being thrown into the air before landing on the pavement as the car keeps going.
Monserrate said she didn’t know what was inside the box, or why it was so precious to her husband.
“That’s what I want to know: Why did he defend it so much?” she said. “Why was he so tied to that box? I don’t understand. How valuable could it have been to him? I don’t know.”
The thieves remained on the loose Thursday.
“This didn’t have to happen,” said one of the victim’s four siblings, Francisco Chimbay. “They killed him and I want them to pay. This can’t end like this. We all want justice.”
Francisco spoke to his brother just hours before his death — and was looking forward to meeting up with his younger sibling later in the day when he got the dreaded call.
“I was going to go to his house when a friend who was with him called me … and said your brother is on the ground,” Francisco Chimbay, 47, recalled. “They tried to steal his car and he’s down on the ground and he’s bleeding. He’s not getting up.
“I thought he had just gotten knocked out,” he continued. “But when I got there I saw all the blood and that he had hit his head.
“I tried to get close but the police didn’t let me. They were trying to revive him and took him to the hospital. He didn’t last a half-hour at the hospital.”
The death of their loved one has hit hard for the Chimbay clan, which is still mourning their father’s passing six years ago from an illness.
“Now we lost another family member, my brother,” Francisco said. “It was so fast, something so quick that we can’t understand, for this to be done to him.”
He said his brother, who worked in Big Apple restaurants and cafeterias, has two children, a daughter who recently turned 4 years old with Monserrate and an older child from a previous relationship.
Francisco said he was the best man at Mauro’s wedding to Monserrate — and now has a funeral to plan.
The couple recently visited Monserrate’s family in Chicago and arrived home in New York around 2 a.m. Monday, and met up with Mauro’s brother for dinner later in the day before going to see his mother on Tuesday.
“Then on Wednesday morning, around 8 or 9 in the morning, I called him and we talked,” Francisco said. “I told him, ‘I’ll see you later.’ That afternoon I was going to go over to his house when our friend called and told me what happened.”
He said he spent several hours at an NYPD precinct with his devastated sister-in-law “answering a lot of questions” after his brother’s death.
The fatal incident is a symptom of a spike in crime in the neighborhood in recent years, the grieving man said.
“The truth is there’s more crime every day,” Francisco said. Before it was very quiet. I’ve lived here for many years and it was never like this. They steal cars, they steal tires, they break car windows and steal what’s inside.
“Right here, on the corner where I live, they stole a car and they stole the tires from another car,” he added. “Every day there’s more happening here.”
Monserrate agreed.
“This can’t keep happening here,” she said. “People go out just to hurt someone else. That can’t keep happening. It’s not the first time. There are so many others.”