Metro

Tossed cart hit philanthropist

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A wealthy Manhattan real-estate agent buying Halloween goodies for underprivileged kids at an East Harlem mall was nearly killed by two 12-year-old punks who dropped a shopping cart on her from four stories above — then laughed about it later, police sources said yesterday.

Marion Salmon Hedges was with her 13-year-old son, who watched in horror as his mom fell to the ground in the East Harlem mall on Sunday.

“We heard a little boy just screaming,” recalled Susan Mahoney, who was at the mall with her doctor husband, Gaurav Patel, and 1-year-old son, Kieran.

“My husband saw [Hedges] on the ground, so he gave me Kieran and started checking her pulse.”

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Patel, a resident at New York- Presbyterian Hospital, “was giving her CPR, and I realized that the screaming boy was her son, so I took him aside and helped call his grandma,’’ Mahoney said. “Gaurav said she was [in cardiac arrest] for about a minute. He did chest compressions, and she became responsive,” the wife said.

Hedges’ teary-eyed father-in-law, Michael Hedges Sr. — at Harlem Hospital, where she was in a medically induced coma — was asked yesterday whether she’ll recover and responded, “It’s in God’s hands now.

“It’s her just lying in bed unconscious with 50,000 tubes in her. She’s stable,” though, said the father-in-law, whose son Michael Jr., was en route from his top finance job in Spain last night.

As to the suspects, he seethed, “[The DA] should throw the book at them.’’

The pint-sized perps were smiling, telling jokes and laughing with each other after they were taken into custody, police sources told The Post.

At one point, suspect Raymond Hernandez of Harlem started crying like a baby — but clearly only because he got caught, not because he felt any remorse for leaving the victim near death, the sources added.

“They were just doing it for fun,’’ one source said of the horrendous cart-pushing stunt late Sunday afternoon outside the Costco on East 116h Street in Manhattan.

The boys had been part of a group of hooligans tossing Slushees over the 3¹/2-foot high railing of a parking-level walkway outside Target earlier in the day, cops said.

Hernandez and pal Jeovanni Rosario, also of Harlem, then allegedly moved on to shoving carts. The pair slammed one cart, and it got stuck on the railing, law-enforcement sources said.

A 14-year-old buddy urged the duo to give it up, but Hernandez was so determined to make sure it went over the edge that he allegedly pushed it again, and it went crashing down onto the 47-year-old mom-of-two as she stood at a kiosk to pay for parking outside Costco with her son, Dayton, the sources said.

They were nabbed after their friend told authorities what happened and police went building to building in their neighborhood looking for them.

Marion Hedges, a graduate of the elite Spence School and Barnard College, has been living with Dayton and daughter Elizabeth, 14, at a West 95th Street townhouse while her husband is abroad.

She works for Prudential Douglas Elliman, but is best known for volunteering for groups like the Junior League, which named her “Outstanding Volunteer” of 2006.

The two young suspects were charged in Family Court with assault as juveniles.

Friends of both boys’ families insisted they’re “good kids.”

Additional reporting by Brad Hamilton, Andy Campbell, Jamie Schram, Lorena Mongelli, Jessica Simeoneand Ikimulisa Livingston

dan.mangan@nypost.com