A Google engineer enjoying a quiet walk in Central Park yesterday was hit on the head by a large branch that snapped from a tree — a freak accident that left the father of two in a coma.
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, 33, was alone on a footpath between Central Park West and West Drive near 63rd Street at 8:15 a.m. when the rotting branch suddenly broke and fell on him from 20 feet above.
He was instantly knocked unconscious.
His wife, Rebecca Min, and his family anxiously waited for news at New York Hospital, where he was in critical condition.
An uncle, Marty Goldensohn, 62, said doctors are hopeful.
“He’s progressing. He’s responding to touch and command, but it’ll take time,” he said.
He described his nephew as “a brilliant guy with IQ to spare.”
Blair-Goldensohn, the father of two girls, was hired by Google in 2007 after earning a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia.
“This is just horrifying,” said his graduate adviser, Professor Kathy McKeown.
“Sasha is a great guy, a wonderful person, and you just can’t imagine something like this happening. His youngest daughter was born just this past winter. He has such a wonderful family.”
Blair-Goldensohn, who lives on West End Avenue, is an expert on developing search software that uses natural language.
“He did his Ph.D. on a system that could answer open-ended questions, like finding a biography or a dictionary definition,” McKeown said.
His research appealed to Google, where he works on a small team in the New York office that improves the Web giant’s “natural language processing,” she said.
When he did not show up for work at Google’s Ninth Avenue offices yesterday, his colleagues became concerned.
“Everyone is really upset and shocked,” one co-worker said. “Sasha is a really great guy and very generous with his time — and he’s super smart.”
Parks officials said the limb on the pin-oak tree was more than four inches in diameter.
The branch was dead wood, rotted out in the interior, and the fall had nothing to do with the bad weather, Parks sources said.
The tree was inspected after the incident, and was found to be sound.
But the branch “was rotted out and it was liable to fall, and, unfortunately, it did,” a Parks employee said.
One parkgoer who watched the cleanup said she never imagined danger would come from above.
“Of all the things to happen to you in Central Park,” she said, “I don’t think anyone ever worries about getting attacked by a tree.”
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario