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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

NYC clinic probed after woman dies during abortion

Detectives are investigating a Queens clinic where a 37-year-old woman was fatally injured while undergoing an abortion, officials said Tuesday.

Alexandra Nuñez began bleeding heavily during the procedure at A1 Medicine in Jackson Heights on Monday, officials said.

One of Nuñez's arteries was inadvertently severed and she went into cardiac arrest, according to police sources.

She was taken to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where she died a short time later.

Detectives have interviewed the staff at the Roosevelt Ave. clinic, but no charges have been filed, police said.

"There is an investigation going forward," said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, "but as of yet, there's no indication of any criminality."

Nuñez, a single mother of four who lived in Plainfield, N.J., underwent the procedure at 3:30p.m., police said.

She had told her family that she was going to a doctor's office in Newark to have a cyst removed - and her death stunned her eldest daughter.

"I'm upset because I never got a chance to say goodbye," said Daisy Davila, 19. "She didn't want anyone to go with her. I made dinner and lunch [yesterday] hoping she would come back."

"We're not angry. We just want to know what happened," said Davila, who insisted that her mother did not believe in abortions. "She was a strong woman, always happy. I looked up to her."

An employee at the clinic - a one-stop gynecology and plastic surgery clinic that was still seeing patients yesterday - insisted that everything had gone well at the second-floor medical facility.

"The patient was transferred to the hospital, she didn't die at the clinic," said the woman, who refused to give her name. "Nothing happened here."

A1 Medicine was accredited in July to do office-based surgery that requires moderate or deep anesthesia - and that includes abortions, according to a spokeswoman for the state Health Department.