A merchant mariner visiting friends in his old neighborhood was killed early yesterday when a gunman fired wildly into a crowd outside a trendy Queens club, sources said.

“I prefer God to take me than my son,” said Derrick Moore’s heartbroken mom, Deloris.

“It’s the most awful experience in my life,” she said.

Moore, 29, had just finished a night out with his brother, Eric, 27, and pals at the RSVP Lounge in Astoria at about 4 a.m. when they heard shots, said the victim’s devastated girlfriend, Chi Chi Wymes, 28.

“They didn’t think it was close to them,” she said. “Then he fell — face first. They thought he was playing around.”

Moore, a general vessel assistant previously stationed in the Middle East, later died at Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens.

“It just seems like he was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Wymes. “He never had problems with anybody.

“We were planning on having kids. He really was the love of my life,” she said.

The shooter’s target outside the hot spot on Broadway and 43rd Street was one of Moore’s friends, stemming from an argument that originated in the Queensbridge Houses, police sources said.

That friend was wounded in the melee, the sources said.

Mariame Elidrissi, 41, lives above the club and was awoken by five consecutive gunshots.

“I ran to the window and saw four men arguing. Then a man pulled a gun and people started running,” she recalled.

“I heard three more shots and I saw one young man fall and another run across the street to the post office.

“I heard a young girl yell ‘Kill him!’ and the man with the gun ran across the street,” after him, Elidrissi said.

Then she saw the killer “point his gun at a man who begged him, ‘Please don’t kill me.’ “

“A big man, who looked like a bouncer, pushed the man out of the way and tried to intimidate the gunman by getting close and saying, ‘Go home, just go home,’ ” Elidrissi told The Post.

The gunman tossed the weapon and fled. No arrests had been made as of last night.

Wymes said they were saving so they could start a family and Moore could realize his dream of opening a soul-food restaurant.

“He fried the best chicken. He was a skinny guy who loved to eat,” she said.

Moore had also just finished taking a class in Maryland to recertify for the Merchant Marines because he loved seeing the world, Wymes added.

“He went to Africa and met someone who didn’t have any shoes,” she recalled him telling her.

“He gave him his $200 [Nike Air] Jordans because he didn’t want the man to walk around barefoot.”

She also said that Moore: “was just a funny guy.

“Even when I was mad at him, I couldn’t stay mad at him for long because I’d start laughing.”

Additional reporting by Larry Celona