It didn’t take long for hulking hoopster Miladin Kovacevic’s pals to realize that they were in a world of trouble.
As the brutish SUNY-Binghamton basketball player and his friends drove from the Rathskeller bar, the scene of his alleged beating of fellow student Bryan Steinhauer, the scrawny victim slipped into a coma.
Officers responding to the May 4 incident thought he was at death’s door.
“Sanel, why did you do that? He didn’t even touch me!” a sobbing Melissa Cartagena screamed in the car at her boyfriend, Sanel Softic, according to one of several detailed statements in an 80-page police report obtained by The Post.
Softic replied: “I don’t care. He touched your ass.”
Kovacevic then told everyone to shut up.
“It doesn’t matter. It happened,” he said, according to a statement from friend Emir Karic. “Don’t talk about it. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.”
The trio, along with Karic and another woman, then drove to Softic’s house.
Meanwhile, across town, with Steinhauer’s skull cracked and his brain bleeding, Binghamton Police-shift supervisor Sgt. John Ryan wrote in his report: “EMS opinion of injuries and condition was that death was a strong possibility.”
Pals of Kovacevic, the 6-foot-9, 260-pound Serb charged in the near-fatal beating, quickly blamed the victim in their statements to the cops.
They claimed that the 135-pound Steinhauer started the fight by groping Cartagena, head-butting her boyfriend, and taking a swing at the towering Kovacevic, according to police reports.
Kovacevic’s co-defendants and their pals insisted there was no trouble until Steinhauer grabbed the buttocks of the sexy sophomore, whose Facebook profile is adorned with dozens of provocative pictures – including one of her holding a penis-shaped cake and a condom.
“Melissa had her back to him, and he was getting very close to her,” Softic, who is also charged in the beating, told the police right after the fight.
“I stepped between them and said, ‘What the hell are you doing? This is my girlfriend! Get the f- – – out of here!” said Softic, 21.
But Steinhauer clenched his fists and twice yelled, “You don’t f- – -ing know me!” before butting his head into the taller Softic’s face, bloodying his nose, according to Softic’s statement.
That’s when Kovacevic, a 20-year-old known to pals as “Minja,” jumped in. In her statement, Cartagena, 20, said she then saw Steinhauer throw a punch.
“I don’t know if the punch was directed at Senal or Minja,” she said. “Then I saw that the guy that head-butted Senal was lying on the floor on his back. Minja was over top of the kid, and I seen Minja punch the kid at least four times.”
The police say Kovacevic, Softic and Edin Dzubur, 24, went on to stomp Steinhauer repeatedly about the head and body.
After being pummeled by Kovacevic, Softic said, Steinhauer “looked like he was dead.”
He added: “My girlfriend pulled my arm hard and wanted to go. I seen Minja get one more stomp on the kid and start walking away.
” ‘Let’s get the f- – – out of here. Let’s leave,’ ” Softic quoted Kovacevic as saying.
Softic and Dzubur at first didn’t admit their roles in the assault, but they later said they kicked Steinhauer in the legs while Kovacevic dealt the more savage blows to his head and chest.
When he was arrested the morning after the attack, Kovacevic denied even having been in a fight. He later acknowledged knocking down a man who had “punched him in the side of the head,” according to the police report.
“Kovacevic would not, at any time, admit to punching or kicking anyone,” the report read.
And when told of Steinhauer’s condition, the massive man “had no reaction.”
An attorney for Steinhauer’s family, Irwin Rochman, dismissed the statements as “clearly being from self-interested parties.”
“It’s just blatant thuggery,” Rochman said. “Whatever happened, it doesn’t justify the disproportionate reaction on their part, kicking him when he was down and into a coma. This isn’t the wild West.”
After the beating, paramedics rushed the severely injured Steinhauer at 2:05 a.m. to an emergency room, where a trauma team went to work on him immediately.
More than an hour later, doctors told cops him that he had suffered a “fractured skull and middle-brain bleeding.”
At 3:35 a.m., doctors placed a tube in Steinhauer’s brain to drain blood, and he was taken to the intensive care unit.
Softic told The Post yesterday that Cartagena was “doing wonderful” and that “the situation was all one big misunderstanding.”
The police “know that I wasn’t involved,” he said. “And when the courts get started, everyone will see that.”
“How’s the kid,” he added, “I hear he’s doing better.”