A 37-year-old woman walking down the street talking on a cellphone in the West Village was killed in a freak accident when she was struck by a giant piece of plywood that was ripped off a fence by a wind gust, authorities said Wednesday.
The 4-foot-by-8-foot, green-painted board sailed 50 feet across West 12th Street and hit real-estate agent Tina Nguyen so hard that it threw her against a building, where she smashed her head on an FDNY stand pipe.
Nguyen, who worked for the Park Avenue firm Keller-Williams and who was engaged to be married, was pronounced dead Tuesday at Bellevue Hospital shortly after the 6 p.m. tragedy.
Winds were gusting up to 40 mph hour at the time. The plywood board was ripped from a street-level security fence surrounding a luxury condo-construction site on the lot where St. Vincent’s Hospital once stood.
“I was working normally yesterday when I heard screams coming from outside,” said an employee at the Quik Park across from the work site. “I looked and saw a man crouched down cradling a young woman in his arms. He was screaming, ‘Somebody help! Call 911!’ ”
The worker ran inside and called 911 without even knowing what had happened to the woman.
“There was a crowd of people around the woman by the time I got off the phone,” the worker said. “It was really so sad. It could have happened to anyone.”
Paramedics found Nguyen lying in front of a parking garage with severe head and body trauma.
Eric Jana, 33, who lives in the building that Nguyen was thrown into, said, “It’s frightening . . . This was just a terrible freak accident.”
A Keller-Williams spokesperson said Nguyen recently joined the firm. Her fiance Alejandro Beitler, said they had been together for 5 years and that she will be buried in Philadelphia.
“She always saw the best in everyone,” he said, according to DNAinfo.com. “This is the most devastating loss. She was the woman of my dreams.”
The city Department of Buildings issued an immediate stop-work order at the construction site, and sent inspectors.
A DOB spokesman said it was too early to say if action would be taken against Turner Construction, the firm operating at the site.
“It is the responsibility of building owners and construction site managers to ensure their properties are safeguarded and in code- compliant conditions at all times,” said an agency spokesman.
The plywood that struck Nguyen remained on the ground for several hours after the accident, and pedestrians walked over it until workers nailed it back into place on the wall. The site will become a luxury condominium complex called The Greenwich Lane.
The property owners and Turner have been hit with several serious violations for creating a dangerous environment on the street.
“We are deeply saddened by the death of a pedestrian who was walking near the construction site on West 12th Street,” Turner Construction spokesman Chris McFadden said.