Chen is asking Chinese authorities to release the nephew, Chen Kegui, who Cohen said is not allowed to speak to anyone while in police custody.

Lawyers from Beijing and elsewhere in China “have all tried to go to this boy’s defense and they’ve all been stopped,” Cohen said.

Kegui had “attempted to defend himself against thugs who invaded his house and beat up his parents,” Cohen said, adding that the action was in retaliation for Chen’s departure “without warning or permission.”

“This is standard stuff in his village,” Cohen said. “This is what Chen was protesting.”

Cohen told the AP the dissident is also very concerned about what will happen to two others who helped him — a woman who drove his getaway van and a legal scholar who cared for Chen and who Cohen says is now under house arrest.

“I’ve known Chen a long time and I can see he’s seriously troubled,” Cohen said.

The woman, He Peirong, had never met Chen when she secretly drove to his village, picked him up in a van “and delivered him to Mr. Guo.”

Guo Yushan, a Chinese academic, helped Chen when he got to Beijing. When Chen changed his mind about staying in China, Guo helped him put out a statement “that clarified what his thoughts were,” Cohen said.

Guo was picked up by police, detained and interrogated, but was released.

“But now that Chen is away, they’re going back and putting Guo under severe house arrest — home imprisonment,” Cohen said.

He said U.S. authorities are aware of Chen’s concern for people in his inner circle in China, and “we hope these cases can be solved in a fair and open manner.”

He added that he and Chen hoped the U.S. government will be “able to do something.”

The dissident and the New York law professor have been in touch for years, since they met when Chen came to the United States on a State Department program in 2003.

Cohen advised Chen while he was in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he was given sanctuary after his daring escape following seven years of prison and house arrest.

That triggered a diplomatic standoff over his fate. With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Beijing for annual high-level discussions, officials struck a deal that let Chen walk free, only to see him have second thoughts. That forced new negotiations that led to an agreement to send him to the U.S. to study law at New York University.

Since his arrival from China on Saturday, Chen has stayed in his new Manhattan home with his wife and children.

As a fellow at New York University’s law school, he was given “a very nice apartment” that is part of faculty housing, Cohen said.

Chen is getting medical treatment for his foot, having suffered three broken bones while fleeing from his village.

He has difficulty walking and is “a little jet-lagged,” but is otherwise in “a good mood,” Cohen said.

Paul Lindahl co-founded the company leading the comeback, Colossal Media. He hired Pastusak to teach what he’s been doing for three decades to a younger generation.

Though computers have taken over, ad painting fascinates people, says Lindahl, who likens the craft to performance art.

“People really stop and they watch, and they want to know what’s going on, and they want to know what it is that you’re painting,” Lindahl says.

Apprentice Liam McWilliams, 23, says it’s “very exciting” to work with people who have been doing this their whole lives “through the snow, the heat, day in and day out.”

On a recent day, they made a beautiful, red-lipped woman a brunette in an ad for the social network Badoo as they stood suspended five stories above the street.

Painting ads is one method of promoting products that dates to the 1800s, when advertising murals were painted by hand on blank brick side walls.

Hand-painted wall advertising peaked in the early 1980s and faded in popularity as computers made large-scale vinyl printing possible. But “the respect for a hand-painted sign is still there,” Pastusak says.

So it’s comeback time for a job that’s not easy.

“At the end of the day you have to be able to meet a deadline, and you have to be able to make it look like it wasn’t painted,” Lindahl says.

Fans like Frank Jump, author of the new book “Fading Ads of New York City,” says hand-painted wall ads are close to modern art.

“The best thing about a hand-painted sign,” he says, “is it’s hand-painted.”

The children were identified as Jocelyn Gonzalez, 10, the daughter of the driver, Niely Rosario, 7, and Marly Rosario, 3, both daughters of Nunez.

“They were a good, wholesome family,” a Bronx neighbor, Felicia Lee, 29, told the Daily News.

“The mother always kept an eye on her children. They were typical little girls. They were gorgeous. They were so pretty,” Lee said.

Werner said the crash scene, less than five miles from Gonzalez’s Bronx home, was difficult to see, with contents of the van, including a pink schoolbag, strewn about.

“When you see young kids that have been hurt or injured or lose their life, it’s always harder than if you find someone that’s an elder age,” Werner said. “It affects all our units.”

The 2004 Honda Pilot was headed south on the Bronx River Parkway when it bounced off the median, crossed three southbound lanes and hit the curb, causing the vehicle to become airborne, continue over the guardrail and plunge 59 feet, police said.

The cause of the crash, which happened around 12:30 p.m., was unclear, and police haven’t yet said how fast the SUV was traveling. A city official said the guardrail’s height would be one of the safety issues investigated.

“Obviously, the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed,” Werner said. “It hit something that caused it to become airborne.”

Werner said that it doesn’t appear that any other vehicles were involved.

Police said all the victims were wearing seat belts.

Relatives said the grandparents had arrived from the Dominican Republic three days earlier. They had 13 children, six of whom live in the United States. They were headed to a family party when the accident occurred.

Maria Gonzalez, the driver, worked at Fodham University in maintenance.

“I don’t want to live any more. I want to die,” said her husband, Juan Gonzalez

The SUV landed in a wooded area on the edge of zoo property that’s closed to the public and far from any animal exhibits, zoo spokeswoman Mary Dixon said. The vehicle lay mangled hours later, its right doors ripped off and strewn amid the trees along with items from the car. Next to the heavily wooded area are subway tracks and a train yard.

The medical examiner’s office said it expected to release the victims’ causes of death on Monday.

The accident was the second in the past year where a car fell off the same stretch of the Bronx River Parkway. Last June, the driver of an SUV heading north lost control and the SUV hit a divider, bounced through two lanes of traffic and fell 20 feet over a guardrail, landing on a pickup truck in a parking lot. The two people in the SUV were injured.

City agencies will be asked to look at safety issues on the highway including guardrail height, Bronx borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. said in a statement Sunday.

“My prayers, as well as those of my office and all Bronxites, go out to the families of the seven victims,” he said.

The wreck was the deadliest in New York City since the driver of a tour bus returning from a Connecticut casino in March 2011 lost control and slammed into a pole that sheared the bus nearly end to end, killing 14 passengers.

In 2009, just north of New York City in suburban Westchester County, a woman carrying a vanload of children drove nearly two miles in the wrong direction on a highway before colliding with an SUV. Eight people were killed, including four children. An autopsy determined that the woman, Diane Schuler, had downed at least 10 drinks and had smoked marijuana as recently as 15 minutes before the wreck.