The trembling daughter of a Manhattan woman who was nearly beaten to death came face to face with her mom’s alleged attacker for the first time Wednesday — saying the vicious assault “turned my life upside down.”
“I couldn’t control it,” Stephanie Rodas, 21, told The Post about the shaking and flood of tears that came with laying eyes on accused goon and paroled rapist Miguel Jiraud for the first time in a Manhattan courtroom.
“So many emotions. I see him and all I can see is the aftermath for my mom in that bed, just crying.
“How could someone do this? How could someone look at my mom and just be able to do this?” Rodas said. “He turned my whole life around. He turned my life upside down. Why?”
Jiraud, 30, was still on parole for a felony rape conviction and wearing a monitoring ankle bracelet when prosecutors said he ambushed Diana Agudelo on a bike path on Randall’s Island in an unprovoked and senseless attack on May 16, leaving her for dead.
Police said Jiraud, who was living at a homeless shelter on the island at the time, later returned to the scene and bizarrely called 911 to report the crime he allegedly committed.
Authorities used his tracking bracelet to tie him to the crime — and the ex-con was arraigned on attempted murder and robbery charges in the vicious attack on Agudelo this week. He pleaded not guilty.
Rodas said the cowardly assault left her mom nearly catatonic after having to undergo brain surgery.
“She’s not fully conscious,” she told The Post. “She can’t look at you for longer than a minute before her eyes start drifting again. She’s not in a medically induced coma anymore — they had to do a mini surgery where they put a tube through her spine up to her brain to take away that fluid.
“And she’s been having fevers on and off and there is an infection but they don’t know what is causing it.”
She said she went to court to see the monster that shattered her life.
“He didn’t look at me,” Rodas said. “But I looked at him, and I don’t think he even looked back once.
“He seemed just like a normal person,” she added. “I would have walked past him and not thought about it twice. I wouldn’t even have known. I wouldn’t suspect … She was just trying to get home from work.”
Agudelo was returning home from her job at the Museum of the City of New York along a bike path near 600 East. 125th Street around 11:30 p.m. when she was attacked, according to police.
Jiraud’s ankle monitor – which he has been wearing since being paroled in August – showed him moving at 16 mph near the scene, potentially while riding Agudelo’s stolen e-bike that police later found dumped in the East River, the sources said.
The monitor then showed Jiraud go back to Agudelo, where he called 911, according to the sources.
Jiraud was on parole after serving more than 10 years in state prison after being convicted of a February 2011 rape in which he dragged a 28-year-old woman from an elevator in the Bronx up to a roof, where he choked her before sexually assaulting her, records show.
In court Wednesday, Judge Cori Weston ordered that he be held without bail.
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