A Queens dad gunned down days before his 40th birthday had rushed to help for a friend who had just been groped by the gunman, his devastated mother said.
Rahsaun Williams, 39, mouthed off to the gun-packing creep at about 7:30 p.m. Friday after Williams’ on-again, off-again girlfriend called him to say another man had slapped her buttocks, police and the family said.
The dispute turned physical and the other man pulled out a gun and shot Williams in the stomach and left shoulder, according to cops.
“The world is now just crazy nowadays,” his mother Beverly Williams told The Post Tuesday as she planned her son’s funeral. “I don’t know what’s going on with the guns. Everybody got a gun.”
The man who shot Williams — whose birthday would have been Wednesday – was still on the loose as his grieving family tried to make sense of the senseless violence.
Beverly Williams called said her son was “her king.”
“His older brother always said he was my favorite,” the 62-year-old retired home health aide said.
“No, it wasn’t that he was my favorite. He was just the one that stuck to me. He went where I went. If anyone so much as breathe hard on me, he wasn’t having it — do not mess with his mother.
“He was always protective of me, my protector,” she continued, tears streaming from her eyes. “It’s tragic, it’s really tragic. I would have never dreamed nothing like this, not in a million years.”
The death has left her “walking in a nightmare,” the shattered matriarch said.
“This boy was my heart,” she said. “They just ripped my heart out.”
Friends, family and neighbors made an impromptu memorial outside her home with candles, empty Hennessy bottles, a teddy bear and a message board filled with heartbreaking missives labout Williams who was nicknamed “Badness.”
“Rest in Peace, King,” one message said of the slain man, who had two daughters and a son.
His 16-year-old daughter, Cashnere Williams, pledged to “protect our legacy and family.”
“Imma make sure your name, B.A.D. stays alive, I love you forever and your baby gonna miss you,” Cashnere wrote.
Beverly Williams said her son had just moved to a new apartment in Jamaica, Queens, and the family had planned to go to the Barclays Center on Friday for Nick Cannon’s “Wild ‘N Out Live” to celebrate his upcoming birthday.
But that celebration never came.
“My baby is gone,” she wept. “He’s gone.”
Latasha Nicolson, mother of Cashnere Williams, added that Williams was a creative soul who loved Red Lobster, enjoyed theme parks and reveled in the holidays.
“He is very creative,” she said. “He makes the Halloween costumes, and he goes trick-or-treating with the kids. I don’t know how that’s going to work this year.
“He does the holidays, the ugly Christmas sweater — that’s his thing.”
Beverly Williams said she’d nicknamed her son “Badness” because she fell in the tub and broke her ankle when she was nine months pregnant with him.
“I said, ‘Oh this boy is going to be trouble,” she said. “But he was never trouble. He’s just Rashaun Badness.”
Williams, who had the first three letters of his mom’s name tattooed on his neck, also loved rap music and was in the music video for Jay-Z’s 1999 song, “Do It Again,” when he was just a young teen, his family said.
His mother said she isn’t surprised he died trying to help someone else — that was just his character.
He and the woman whose honor he rushed to defend had apparently just been rekindling their relationship.
“She said some guy slapped her on the rear end,” Beverly said. “He came, I guess he said something to the guy, now my child is dead.
“The person who did this is somewhere hiding and running, but you can’t run forever,” she said.
“There is no statute of limitation for murder,” she continued. “I hope they rot in jail, I really do. I hope they have every day of their life, not running like they plan on doing.
“I hope they sit in a cell and just think about it.”