New York -- As a young woman lay dying in a Brooklyn abortion facility last Wednesday, her fiance - unaware of the tragedy - was in the waiting room getting a page that Tommy Boy Records had just signed him to a contract.
"I was waiting for her to get out so I could tell her the good news," Rudy Alston, a rapper who uses the stage name Floss, told The Post yesterday.
"But she never came out."
Tamika Dowdy, 22, of Crown Heights, was pronounced dead after having a legal abortion at Long Island College Hospital on Wednesday. Cops went to the Brooklyn Women's Medical Pavilion on Court Street on Tuesday after receiving a call that a woman was having trouble breathing.
Paramedics arrived at 6 p.m. and began furiously performing CPR, but they bypassed the waiting room where Alston had been since noon -- a full six hours after Dowdy had arrived at the abortion facility.
A male abortion practitioner kept walking in and out of the waiting room, Alston said.
"He was sweating real fierce and pacing," Alston, 22, said. "He did that several times, and then finally he came up to me and said her heart had stopped."
Alston rode by Dowdy's side in the ambulance from the abortion facility to the hospital.
The two, who lived one floor apart in a St. Mark's Street building, had planned to be married in January or February. Dowdy was four months pregnant.
The couple didn't want a child because Dowdy wanted to go to a two-year accounting school so she could handle the finances of Floss and his three-man group, Council, Alston said.
Authorities have not released the name of the person who performed the abortion, but the abortion facility has been under scrutiny for a Nov. 14 incident in which a woman suffered a perforated uterus from a legal abortion, state Health Department spokeswoman Frances Tarlton said.
That woman checked out of a hospital after receiving treatment from the abortion complications, and authorities have been unable to locate her, Tarlton said.
The department is investigating Dowdy's death.
Darrel Dowdy, Tamika's 18-year-old brother, said, "I want that place closed down. I want that doctor arrested for murder."
Friends said Dowdy was a sweet, churchgoing young woman whose mother died of a heart attack one year ago yesterday.
"I lost my mother and now my sister," Darrel Dowdy said. "I am alone now."
No one from Tommy Boy Records could be reached to confirm the deal with Council.
But the young rapper said he had been dreaming of making his wedding party a celebration not only of the marriage, but also of the contract. "We had a lot of plans together," he said. Thanks to the abortion that killed his fiance, "Now I don't have any."
Abortion practitioners were still performing abortions at the Brooklyn Women's Health Pavilion yesterday.
A woman who answered the intercom outside the abortion facility's third-floor offices called security to throw out a Post reporter and photographer.
Police officials tried to squelch news of the tragic abortion death by omitting from their daily report that Dowdy died after an abortion, a police source said. They included only the address where the incident took place, not even mentioning an abortion was involved.