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HIT-RUN TRAGEDY : CABBY SLAMS INTO ‘CONFUSED’ OLD GUY

A disoriented elderly Cuban immigrant was mowed down and killed by an unwitting taxi driver in Midtown early yesterday, cops and neighbors said.

Saturnino Vega, 86, was hit at 4:50 a.m. at the corner of West 51st Street and Ninth Avenue, a block from the hospital where he goes for dialysis treatment.

The taxi was driven by Farid Abousaid, 62, who was taking a passenger to Newark Airport. Abousaid continued down Ninth Avenue because he didn’t realize he had hit Vega, cops said.

An alert limousine driver, also headed to Newark, jotted down the taxi’s license plate and followed Abousaid, who was driving with a suspended license, to the Lincoln Tunnel before phoning cops, who later arrested the cabby, sources said.

Vega, 86, who normally waits for a home-care attendant to walk him to St. Clare’s Hospital at 9 a.m. three times a week for kidney treatment, inexplicably left his home at 345 W. 50th St. alone for the three-block hike more than three hours early, neighbors said.

He was hit by the taxi just a few steps from St. Clare’s and died there an hour later, cops said.

“Why would he leave so early?” asked Vega’s brother-in-law, Elio Sanchez. “He must have gotten confused. He sometimes mistakes morning and afternoon.”

The limo driver’s information helped cops track down and arrest Abousaid, of Fairview, N.J., at a garage on West 23rd Street around 12:30 p.m., sources said.

Detectives believed the cabby when he said he didn’t know he hit the man, and he was charged with leaving the scene of an accident and driving with a suspended license.

Sanchez doesn’t put all the blame on Abousaid’s shoulders.

“I feel sorry for him. I don’t feel well a person has to go to jail for a thing like that,” Sanchez said. “Saturnino doesn’t always know what he is doing.”

Sanchez said Vega became reclusive and started getting sick when his wife, Ines, died four years ago after a heart attack, and he was planning to spend Christmas alone.

“He was very lonely,” Sanchez said.

Vega and his wife fled communist Cuba in 1966. He moved to New York and worked as a mechanic in a factory.