Dr. Mansoor Day (left) and the driver who allegedly struck him. (
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TRAGEDY: Dr. Mansoor Day (inset top) was in critical condition after being hit by an SUV driven allegedly by the man pictured below. (
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An elderly doctor who co-founded one of New York’s first abortion clinics was fighting for his life yesterday after being run down by an out-of-control SUV on the sidewalk in front of Saks Fifth Avenue.
Dr. Mansoor Day, 90, was on his daily constitutional through his adopted home of Manhattan at about 10:50 a.m. when he was struck and critically injured at Fifth Avenue at 49th Street.
“It was just bad luck,” his daughter, Dr. Doris Day, told The Post from her father’s bedside at Bellevue Hospital.
Witnesses said a silver Ford Escape and a van were heading south on Fifth when the van bumped the SUV, sending it careening over the curb into a column at Saks’ entrance as pedestrians dived for cover.
The SUV “was heading right into a group of five or six people. Unfortunately this one person didn’t get out of the way, didn’t look up, and that’s the one guy who got hit,” said witness Owen Hane, 50, a commercial real- estate broker.
“He had on a big winter coat with a big furry hood,” Hane added, suggesting Day didn’t see or hear the SUV coming.
Day, a native of Tehran, Iran, who moved to New York in his 20s, suffered serious head and leg injuries and was rushed to Bellevue, where he was in critical condition last night.
“He considers himself a true-blue American, a lifelong New Yorker,” his daughter said. “He thought it was the greatest city in the world.”
Mansoor, along with two other physicians, Arthur Miller and Roy Gold, founded VIP Medical Associates after the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.
His son, Charles, said Mansoor decided to open the clinic after a colleague’s daughter died from an illegal abortion.
“It was important to him that women had access to abortion,” Charles said.
His daughter, a dermatologist with a practice on the Upper East Side, said Mansoor was more concerned with women’s health than politics.
The unidentified driver of the SUV, which was registered to a North Carolina resident, was not charged.
Additional reporting by Jessica Simeone