Police are investigating the death of a 38-year-old Long Island doctor found unconscious in the vestibule of a Manhattan apartment building.
Investigators initially suspected that Kiersten Cerveny, a dermatologist who lived in Manhasset, had been strangled. They were backing off that assessment late Sunday and said a medical examiner will determine the cause of death. An autopsy was to be conducted Monday.
An unidentified man spotted an unconscious Cerveny at about 8:30 a.m. Sunday in the vestibule of a five-story walk-up building on West 16th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood, investigators said.
The man flagged down an ambulance, but fled, police said.
Emergency medical technicians attempted to resuscitate Cerveny as they loaded her into the ambulance and took her to the Lenox Health emergency room in Greenwich Village. She died at the hospital.
No arrests have been made. Police are looking for the man who waved down the ambulance.
Cerveny had been an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at Weill Cornell Medical College, according to a Dec. 12, 2009 announcement of her marriage to Andrew Cerveny Jr., also a doctor, in The New York Times. She graduated magno cum laude from Duke University and earned her medical degree at Tulane University.
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She met her husband, also a dermatologist, in 2004 while both were residents at the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans.
