NY woman fatally struck by tow truck remembered as staunch anti-Vietnam activist
A 67-year-old woman – remembered as an outspoken anti-Vietnam War activist” – was killed when a tow truck plowed into her in Manhattan, cops and her husband said.
Merle Ratner, an East Village resident, was walking at the intersection of East 10th Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City around 7 p.m. Monday when the truck made a left turn and struck her from behind, according to authorities and her grieving husband of 40 years, Nhan Ngo, 75.
Ratner — who had been on her way to grab food — was pronounced dead at the scene by EMS workers, according to police.
“I came to the morgue and I could only see her face and not her body,” Ngo told The Post in a phone interview Tuesday. “Her face, I think, was broken up inside. That was a painful scene to see. I was crying all along.”
Ratner was a co-coordinator of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign — a nonprofit initiative aimed at insisting that the government “honor its moral and legal responsibility” to compensate all victims of Agent Orange, a tactical herbicide used by the U.S. military to eliminate the foliage that provided cover for opposing troops during the Vietnam War.
The agent later caused various illnesses in many of those who were exposed to it – as well as birth defects in their offspring.
“Merle is more like a humanist,” Ngo said of his wife’s activism. “She would think of the people first, and poor people more than any other people. She loved life, she loved to eat and she loved the Vietnamese.”
Ratner was born in the Bronx and hailed from a Jewish family, her husband said. She voiced her opposition to the Vietnam War since the age of 13 – when she was arrested during a protest.
“She sympathized with the Vietnamese struggle a lot,” her husband said.
“I became an activist around 13 years old,” Ratner once said in a New York Historical Society interview. “At that point there was no cable, and there was no computers, so it was all broadcast TV. There was more and more coverage of the war, I think initially because people were getting drafted.
“People’s brothers, and sons, and husbands, and grandsons were being drafted, and they were coming back either with stories, or they had been killed, and come back in coffins,” she added. “We began to see stories of battles, stories of a lot of people being killed, stories of use of chemical warfare like napalm.”
She first met her husband after the war, when she was involved in welcoming the Vietnamese to the United Nations in 1978.
Ngo, whose first stop in the US was in California, then moved to the Big Apple because he received a scholarship to study at NYU, he said.
“[Merle] was always loving and gentle to me,” Ngo recalled. “It was very good to have to work and then I come home and then we have a meal together. And she loved food. She loved good food.”
Jonathan Moore, an attorney and board member of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign, remembered Ratner fondly.
“Merle Ratner was a friend and colleague who worked tirelessly on behalf of Vietnamese who were poisoned by the United States Government’s use of Agent Orange during the American war in Vietnam,” Moore said. “She also contributed her knowledge and expertise as an organizer to many other progressive causes over the years. She will be dearly missed by all who work hard every day for social and economic justice.”
The driver who allegedly struck Ratner stayed at the scene and no charges were immediately filed, cops said.
