MIAMI — As the victim of a gruesome attack in Miami continued to fight for his life late Sunday, horrific details emerged of the scene that confronted police a day earlier as they arrived to find one naked man eating another’s face.

Saturday’s daylight attack beside a Miami freeway led to police shooting dead the suspect, who continued to bite at his victim’s face even after he was wounded by officers, The Miami Herald reported.

The victim is in critical condition in the hospital and neither man has been identified.

A witness told Sunday of yelling for the attacker to get off his victim, before police arrived and repeated the demand.

As an officer drew his gun and called for an end to the disgusting attack, “the guy just stood … with pieces of flesh in his mouth and he growled,” Larry Vega told WSVN-TV.

He said the scene after the assailant was shot several times and fell alongside his disfigured victim was “one of the most gruesome things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

It remains unclear why the attacker pounced on his victim, who police theorized might have been homeless and laying down when the crazed man began the assault.

It was also unclear how both men came to be naked, but police said the attacker might have been suffering from “cocaine psychosis,” a drug-induced craze that makes a person very hot, according to the Herald.

The incident happened around 2:00pm local time on the side of the MacArthur Causeway off-ramp, near Biscayne Boulevard and just south of The Miami Herald building, the newspaper reported.

According to police sources, a road ranger saw a naked man chewing and biting another man’s face and shouted on his loud speaker for the attacker to back away.

The man refused police orders, which led an officer to fire one shot. When the naked man continued his gruesome attack after being wounded, the officer shot and killed him. A witnesses said as many as six shots were fired. Police requested surveillance video from the Herald’s building, the newspaper reported.

Javier Ortiz, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police in Miami, said the officer who fired the fatal shots was “a hero.”

The incident came as thousands of people descended on South Beach for the annual Urban Beach Week hip-hop festival.