A woman crushed to death by a tow truck driver as she crossed a Manhattan street was a longtime anti-war activist bringing food to a homebound friend.
Merle Ratner, 67, was crossing E. 10th St. in the East Village around 7:05 p.m. Monday when the 59-year-old driver of a flatbed tow truck made a left turn off Avenue C, police said.
“She was taking food to an elderly friend so she would have company,” Ratner’s grieving husband Nhan Thanh Ngo said. “She did that once a week.”
The driver slammed into Ratner, whose packages littered the street after the grisly crash.
“Her groceries were all over the place by her body,” a witness who did not want to be named told the Daily News.
Ratner died at the scene.
“She had a big love for life,” said Ngo, 76. “She just got a new haircut. It was pink!”
Ratner became involved in activism during the Vietnam War when she was a teenager and worked alongside the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a prominent Catholic priest and activist.
Berrigan was imprisoned for burning draft files in a protest against the Vietnam War. He died in 2018 at age 94.
“She started her Vietnam War activism when she was only 13,” Ngo said. “She was an activist for all people, all the people who are in trouble, all the people who are oppressed.”
Before her death, Ratner was working as a New York City public school substitute teacher and was finishing up a master’s program in labor studies.
“She loved her kids, the job and the challenge,” Ngo said.
Ratner had been married to Ngo, a retired computer service and computer linguistics professor at New York University, for nearly 44 years.
“I’m greatly affected by this loss,” Ngo said. “She helped me understand American politics and the lives of poor people.”
The couple lived in the East Village about a half mile from where Ratner was killed.
“She loved the Lower East Side,” Ngo said. “She loved the food and the community.”
The tow truck driver may have not seen the woman over the hood of the truck, police sources said. He has not been charged as cops continue to investigate the crash.
