The owner of the Bronx bodega accused of heartlessly standing by while an innocent teen was dragged out and slaughtered broke his silence on Friday — apologizing to the family and saying he did all he could to help the boy.

“I just feel very bad,” Modesto Cruz, the owner the Cruz and Chiky store in Tremont, told reporters alongside his lawyer in a lengthy interview in both Spanish and English.

Cruz and his workers at the East 183rd Street and Bathgate Avenue store have come under fire after he was accused of not intervening to save the 15-year-old boy before the June 20 knife-and-machete attack that would end Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz’s life.

“I just want the mother [of Guzman-Feliz] to understand…the pain is not only on her. We feel the pain too,” said Cruz, who noted that he knew the teen “from when he was little.”

Surveillance footage from inside the bodega captured Guzman-Feliz run into the store to hide from the pack of suspected members of a Dominican gang known as Trinitarios.

In the footage, a worker appears to stop the teen, but Cruz claims he was trying to help the boy.

“I was closing the store. I already passed the key to close the store when somebody go and jump all over the counter,” Cruz said in broken English. “I was trying to hold him. I don’t know what is going on when he told me they looking for him.”

“I remember his face. He was so scared and I tried to hold him down,” Cruz said, referring to Guzman-Feliz.

Cruz added that he, along with the only other worker at the store that night, “panicked.”

The bodega owner claimed that as soon as the thugs viciously dragged Guzman-Feliz out of the store, he made his first phone call to 911 at 11:39 p.m.

“I spend four minutes [on the phone] with the operator,” Cruz said. “I said, ‘please, send the police.’ She took four minutes.”

Cruz’ lawyer Francisco Serrano claims that his client also made a second 911 call.

“He reacted with the knowledge that he had at that moment,” Serrano said. “He’s not a police officer. He’s not trained to defend himself. How many grocery store owners are killed in the city of New York?”

Serrano said Cruz “tried to hide the kid” before the suspected gang members stormed in and told the store owner “don’t get involved.”

“At that moment we continued to assess the situation,” said Cruz. “There was too many young kids…we’re only two people. We don’t got nothing – no weapon. What they gonna do to us at that moment. They will kill us…I feel scared at the moment. There was a lot of people.”

His lawyer continued that Cruz “did what was humanely possible to save the life of this kid…in my view he was a hero. He attempted to save the kid. They would have been killed themselves.

“What does the community want?” Serrano asked. “Three deaths insread of one?”

“We respect and we’re in grief for what happened to this kid, but we’re not responsible for what happened that night,” Serrano said. “It’s not [Cruz’s] fault that this kid was killed and he didn’t know that these guys were gonna kill this kid…I think all of us would have reacted in the same form and fashion.”

Serrano added: “We’re talking about 90 seconds, and they want him to make a determination and to put his life at risk, which he did initially.”

The press conference comes days after a trio of City Council members called for the shuttering of the Cruz and Chiky store.

“An owner who stands idly by while a 15-year-old is dragged out of his store and murdered in cold blood with a machete is no longer worthy of doing business in NYC,” reads a letter council members Ritchie Torres, Vanessa Gibson and Rafael Salamanca sent to the Department of Consumer Affairs Commissioner Lorelai Salas on Monday demanding the agency yank the deli’s business license.

Another surveillance video from inside the store shows the mortally wounded teen run into the deli after the attack outside the bodega, but a worker motions toward the door.

Serrano claims that Cruz was the one motioning, but he was that motioning to show the teen the direction of where nearby St. Barnabus Hospital is.

Cruz said when he found out the night of the attack that Guzman-Feliz had been killed, “it was so hard.”

“After that, I spent my whole night in the store,” he said. “I don’t went to sleep, because I can’t.”

Additional reporting by Stephanie Pagones