The Bronx man left in a coma after being sucker-punched by a convicted sex offender in a headline-making case bashed the legal system for his attacker’s light sentence.
“He almost cost me my life,” Jesus Cortes Cabrera, 54, told The Post in an exclusive first interview. “I wanted him to stay in jail forever.”
Cortes Cabrera spent three weeks in the hospital after the terrifying, unprovoked August 2022 attack in which sex fiend Van Phu Bui, 56, approached him outside the Fuego Tipico Restaurant in Fordham Manor and cold-cocked him from behind, security footage shows.
Afterwards, Cortes Cabrera was left limp on the sidewalk with a fractured skull, broken cheekbone and brain bleeding.
Bui was sentenced in May to 3 1/2 to 7 years behind bars.
“He destroyed my life,” Cortes said. “After three years, maybe he can [get] out?”
“When I saw the video … when I saw his face … He’s a bad guy — totally 100 percent,” Cortes Cabrera said.
Police initially charged Bui with attempted murder, but the District Attorney’s office claimed there wasn’t enough evidence to support the charges, and reduced them to non-bail-eligible misdemeanors, allowing Bui to walk free after his arrest.
The move sparked outrage, and as criticism mounted Gov. Hochul intervened, ordering the parolee be put back behind bars.
A month after the brazen assault, Bui reasoned he shouldn’t be detained, since Cortes Cabrera survived the attack. “That sh-t don’t make no sense,” he whined in an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Post. “He’s alive. He’s not dead. I thank God he survived. I didn’t want to hurt him that bad. I just hit him once.”
Cortes Cabrera may be alive, but Bui’s attack had an irrevocable impact on his life.
“He destroyed my life,” offered Cortes Cabrera. “Now, I can’t even get work. I cannot send money to my family in Mexico. My brother alone can’t do this; he gives me everything but now we’re two months behind in rent.”
The attack came as Cortes Cabrera was returning from an ATM to pay for a dinner he’d had with his brother and brother-in-law.
“I paid and I came out to go home,” Cortes Cabrera recalled. “All I remember was him hitting me. I woke up at the hospital, but I thought I was home. I tried to walk, but I couldn’t.”
Without getting Cortes Cabrera’s family’s consent first, his surgeons at Jacobi Medical Center performed life-saving surgery on him to stop the brain bleeding and repair some of the 25 fractures the attack left him with.
He awoke from the operation disoriented, he said, and unable to tell doctors what day it was.
Since the attack and the coma, Cortes Cabrera said he has had to re-learn to walk, through brutal physical therapy sessions.
“I was like a little baby,” he explained. “I had to learn everything. They asked me, ‘What color is this?’ I didn’t know. I was scared all the time because I [thought] I may not recover.”
Cortes Cabrera also recently had surgery on his nose to correct lingering breathing difficulties, and needs surgeries on his arms and legs.
While he still can’t return to playing soccer, Cortes Cabrera is once again starting to do something he’s always loved doing: teaching Mexican dance to children at his church.
“My brother,” Juan, “said, ‘Hey man, you can do this!’” Cortes Cabrera said. “When I saw my brother crying, that encouraged me.”
Cortes Cabrera has had visits with his doctors every week since being released from the hospital, and he continues to suffer from Bui’s actions.
“Sometimes when I wake up, I feel a little dizzy,” he said, adding he also has outstanding medical debts from the assault. “I’m taking a lot of medication — for pain, for heart attack, for stroke. I am not comfortable walking outside. All the time I see somebody behind me, I see him again.”
Cortes Cabrera said he’s never watched the entire video of the attack. “I don’t want to see it,” he said.
He thinks “stronger laws” are needed to keep people like Bui off the streets. But while life has changed for him, Cortes Cabrera said the attack failed to destroy his spirits.
“He didn’t take my happiness because I continue to do what I used to do,” Cortes Cabrera said. “I feel well, because of the program at the church with the kids, they help me a lot. They prayed for me. They supported me. I’m happy God gave me another opportunity to live and continue my work with the kids. Something can happen today, but I’m living in the present.”
