Brooklyn father of 2 who didn’t want second car killed riding scooter to work: wife

A Brooklyn physical therapist killed while riding a scooter to work didn’t want to have 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 scooter in Marine Park, his wife Melissa Perloff learned through a phone call while she was driving their daughters to a Hanukkah party Sunday on Long Island.

She learned shortly after that he had died.

“We only have one car,” said the victim’s wife, a public school teacher, through tears. “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 transporting the kids.”

“He had it for a while,” she added. “He loved it. I was like, ‘We need a second car. We have two children now.’ And he said, ‘We don’t need it.’

Ilya, a physical therapist at a nursing home and rehabilitation center, was traveling west on Fillmore Ave. when he collided with a 2015 Toyota Sienna minivan traveling north on E. 38th St. around 11:50 a.m., troopers said. He was going to work.

The impact threw the victim into a parked minivan, police said. Doctors transported Ilya to Mount Sinai in Brooklyn, where he died.

Police said the driver, a 70-year-old woman, remained at the scene and was not injured. She did not face any immediate charges.

Perloff’s wife was on speakerphone when she received the first call from the cops informing her that her husband was in a serious accident and needed to pull over to calm down his 10- and 2-year-old daughters.

She managed to take them to her parents’ house on Long Island before her father took her back to Brooklyn, where she learned that her husband had not survived.

“I’m just trying to hold on for my daughters,” she said as relatives gathered at Ilya’s mother’s house, near where Ilya lived with her family, to comfort them. “It’s nice to have people around, but I worry when they leave. It doesn’t really seem real. I feel like he’s going to walk through the door.”

Illya’s wife described the victim as a free spirit and a handyman who could fix just about anything.

“I called him my own Mr. Fix it,” Melissa said.

“I feel a lot of anxiety,” she added. He was calm about it. He made me feel like everything was going to be okay.

Ilya was very involved with the girls.

“He wasn’t one to not change a diaper,” Melissa said. “He did anything for girls.”

She is devastated that they are now being raised without a father.

“I’ll do what I can to be both, but I can never take his place,” she said. “They will suffer without him.”

“The little one is his favorite,” she added. “She’s in the dad phase. She hasn’t said anything yet but I’m dreading when she says, ‘Where is he?’ I just try to avoid it. I’m scared when she says it, because I don’t think I can listen to her.

Family friends started a GoFundMe to support them, which quickly raised more than $65,000.

Ilya, born in Moscow, loved jet skiing.

His oldest daughter spent all day Monday looking at the water at her family’s Mill Basin home and thinking about her father.

“He loves water,” said his wife. “All day long she was on the balcony, looking at the water and crying.”