A Staten Island man was found dead behind a local pizzeria on Sunday morning, just hours after he was seen drunk and asking to be taken to the restaurant, according to a neighbor.
The victim, identified by sources and neighbors as Julio Morocho, 34, was sprawled out on his driveway early Sunday and repeatedly asked to be taken to the pizza joint, said John Young, 61.
“My daughter is a nurse and she called me and she said there was a man passed out in the driveway,” Young said. “So I told my daughter, ‘Go over to him and check. If you’re a nurse go and check his vitals and she did that. You could hear him saying, ‘Urrggghhh!’
“You could smell the booze. It’s coming through his skin. He kept saying he just needed help getting up,” Young claimed. “I could hear the guy saying, ‘Just help me up, just help me up. Just get me near the pizza shop. I’m not hurt.’
“When I got here I saw them going down the block. He was hissy-pissy drunk.”
Young said two of Morocho’s pals wheeled him to the restaurant — although cops said surveillance video captured Young and another man dropping the dead man off behind the Port Richmond Avenue pizzeria.
No one has been charged in the death, with an autopsy pending.
Police said Morocho’s body was found around 6:15 a.m. Sunday, when an employee at the pizza restaurant showed up for work and found him on the ground. The dead man’s roommate told cops he took “a narcotic in powder form” earlier in the night, and dropped him off outside after he found him “unresponsive” because they didn’t want to get in trouble.
Security camera video reviewed by cops showed two people, allegedly including Young, wheeling Morocho to the pizzeria shortly after 2 a.m., according to law enforcement sources.
Neighbors said Morocho is a native of Ecuador who only recently moved to the neighborhood — which includes a hiring spot for illegal day laborers, locals told The Post.
“The guys across the street, the migrants, waiting for work, they’re all going into this Mexican club here and then they’ll be sleeping on our lawns in the morning,” one longtime resident said. “We called 911 plenty of times saying that these guys are coming out of this bar or this club whatever they want to call it and they’re sleeping on our lawns. There’s no enforcement. No, there’s no enforcement.”
Mario Buonviaggio, head of the Port Richmond Shore Alliance, the local civic association, said the house where Morocho was living has been “a problematic address on this block.”
“A lot of people looking for work, you know, basically hang out here on the corner and around that park across the street,” Bounviaggio said. “And if they don’t get the day labor, if they don’t get the work, then they go over to the bodega on the corner and they get their coffee and maybe that changes to beer shortly thereafter and then they hang out.
“But the police have been showing up pretty regularly for the last two years to that address,” he said. “We’ve received complaints. There have been many complaints. I’ve taken them personally about stolen property about loud music about you know them going into other people’s yards and taking things.”
