‘OH MY GOD’
Dad sees son die in cab-hit horror Bus kills man block away on UWS
A 9-YEAR-OLD Upper West Side boy was hit by a cab and killed in front of his horrified father Friday night .
“Oh no! Oh my God!” Dr. Richard Stock screamed as his son Cooper’s battered body lay across rain-swept WestEnd Ave. — just paces from the family’s home.
Stock had just left his building with Cooper at 8:45 p.m. when the yellow cab slammed into them as they crossed the street near W. 97th St., family friends said.
The grieving dad’s cries alerted nearby doormen, including Alex Lassi, 36, who works down the block from the Stock home.
“(His scream) was terrifying,” said Lassi. “The child was not moving.”
Witnesses in a nearby SUV jumped out of their truck and, fearing the cabbie might leave, hollered at him to stay. The mortified driver did not leave and appeared to be in shock.
The 53-year-old cabbie burrowed his head into his jacket as he waited for police to question him, witnesses recalled.
Paramedics rushed young Cooper to St. Luke’s Hospital, but doctors were unable to save him.
The boy was an avid Knicks fan who loved going to games with his father, 51, his building doorman said.
“We’re going to put up a memorial tomorrow,” the stunned doorman said.
“He was a super kid, a super kid,” one family friend at the hospital told The News. “He was a wizard with numbers. This is a terrible, terrible, tragedy.”
The boy’s father, a radia- tion oncologist whose patient list includes former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, suffered a small leg injury, officials said.
Family members fought back tears as they consoled each other in St. Luke’s emergency room. They were too distraught to talk about the tragedy.
About a half-hour earlier — and just over a block away — a tour bus killed a 73-year-old man after dragging him down W. 96th St.
The Shafer Tour bus was motoring past Broadway at about 8:15 p.m. when it struck the unidentified man, officials said.
The driver apparently never saw him and kept going, pulling the helpless senior under thebus.
Stunned witnesses raced over and flagged down the driver, who ultimately stopped
near Am-- sterdam Ave.
“As soon as I heard that noise, I knew that somebody was underneath the bus,” witness Coral Martin, 23, told The News. “We started running after the bus driver. “Iwas crying and screaming.”
When the bus finally stopped, theman was freed, Martin said. But he was beyond saving. “When they turned him over, his face was all scraped up,” Martin recalled. “His clothes were torn apart and his legs were scraped up.”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t see him!” the panic-stricken bus driver told detectives, according to Martin.
Police were investigating both tragedies Friday night. It was not immediately known if either driver will face charges.