A Brooklyn physical therapist killed while riding a scooter to work didn’t want to get a second car for his commute, even with two young children at home, his heartbroken wife said Tuesday.
Ilya Perloff, 41, collided with a minivan while riding his electric standup scooter in Marine Park, his wife, Melissa Perloff, learned through a phone call as she drove their daughters to a Chanukah party on Long Island on Sunday.
She found out later that he had died.
“We only have one car,” the victim’s tearful wife, a public school teacher, said. “He didn’t want a second car. He loved that scooter. He went to work on it. The only thing he didn’t use it for was to transport the kids.”
“He had it for a while,” she added. “He loved it. I was like, ‘We need a second car. We have two kids now.’ And he’s like, ‘We don’t need it.’ ”
Ilya, a physical therapist at a nursing home and rehabilitation facility, was riding west on Fillmore Ave. when he collided with a 2015 Toyota Sienna minivan traveling north on E. 38th St. at about 11:50 a.m., cops said. He was on his way to work.
The impact sent the victim flying into a parked minivan, police said. Medics rushed Ilya to Mount Sinai Brooklyn hospital, where he died.
Police said the driver, a 70-year-old woman, remained at the scene and was not hurt. She faced no immediate charges.
Perloff’s wife was on speakerphone when she got the initial call from cops that her husband was in a serious crash, and she had to pull over to calm her 10- and 2-year-old daughters.
She managed to get them to her parents’ Long Island house before her father brought her back to Brooklyn, where she received the news her husband had not survived.
“I’m just trying to hold it together for my daughters,” she said as loved ones gathered in Ilya’s mother’s home, near where Ilya lived with his family, to comfort them. “It’s been nice having people around, but I’m worried for when they leave. It doesn’t really feel real. It feels like he’s going to walk in the door.”
Ilya’s wife described the victim as free-spirited and a handyman who could fix just about anything.
”I called him my own personal Mr. Fixit,” Melissa said.
“I get a lot of anxiety,” she added. “He was the calm to that. He made me feel like everything is gonna be fine.”
Ilya was very hands-on with the girls.
“He wasn’t the type that wouldn’t change a diaper,” Melissa said. “He did anything for the girls.”
She is devastated that they will now be raised fatherless.
“I’m going to do what I can to be both, but I’ll never be able to fill his shoes,” she said. “They’re going to suffer without him.”
“The little one, he’s her favorite,” she added. “She’s in the daddy phase. She hasn’t said anything yet, but I’m dreading when she’ll be like, ‘Where is he?’ I’m just trying to avoid it. I’m scared for when she says it, because I don’t think I can listen to it.”
Friends of the family have launched a GoFundMe page to support them that has quickly raised more than $65,000.
As of Monday, five people have died riding standup scooters in the city this year, the same number to date as in 2024, while deaths involving two-wheeled vehicles in general dropped from 78 in 2024 to 62 this year, according to statistics provided by the NYPD.
Ilya, who was born in Moscow, loved jet skiing.
His older daughter spent all day Monday looking at the water from the family’s Mill Basin home and thinking about her father.
“He loves the water,” Ilya’s mother, Irene Perloff, told the Daily News. “All day she was on the balcony looking out at the water and crying.”
