RealChoice: January 15, 1989: Immigrant Dies Abandoned by Abortion Doc at Fake Clinic

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

January 15, 1989: Immigrant Dies Abandoned by Abortion Doc at Fake Clinic

Seeking a Better Life

In April of 1988, Eurice Agbagaa, age 26, flew from her home in Ghana to Dallas to look for work. She had been working with her widowed mother selling fabric in a street market, but she wanted more from life. She wanted to earn money to send home to her family, especially her five-year-old daughter. Eurice hoped to study nursing so that she could get a good job and bring the child to join her in the United States.

Eurice stayed in Dallas for several weeks but wasn't finding employment, so the friend with whom she was staying suggested that she try her luck in New York, where there was a growing Ghanaian community. She moved in with a woman I'll refer to as Ms. X, because her name is never given in news coverage. Ms. X had come to the United States from Ghana five years earlier and was eager to help her friend get settled. Eurice found a job working illegally as a housekeeper in Paterson, New Jersey, where she earned $170 a week, which is around $432 in 2025 dollars. Eurice lived in the home in Patterson during the week then stayed with Ms. X on weekends to be part of a community of others from her native land.

Eurice sent money home, where it made a big difference to her family. In December of 1988, Eurice was able to purchase five dresses to send home to her daughter -- the first Christmas gifts the child had ever received.

In addition to Ms. X, Eurice had another local friend, Eddie Agboh, who had come from the same town in Ghana and was working in the US as a travel agent. He was one of the elders in the close-knit Ghanaian community. Eddie's brother, Kenneth Agboh, also spoke with Eurice by phone sometimes while she was in New Jersey.

But an affair with a married Ghanaian man, never identified in news coverage, started Eurice down a tragic road.

Fake Clinic, Unqualified Staff

Eurice had been in the United States only nine months when she went to Y.P. Woman's & Medical Association in the Bronx, NY at 11:30 a.m. on January 7, 1989. Though the facility looked like a clinic, it was run by non-physicians who hired a nurse, scheduled appointments, and rented space to doctors who would independently use the space to see patients. It was, in short, a fake clinic. Eurice had found it with help from her friend, Ms. X.

Abram Zelikman estimated the pregnancy as 11 to 12 weeks. He performed the abortion at about 1pm, then sent Eurice to the recovery room under the care of receptionist Yolanda Penalzer, who had administered the general anesthesia for Eurice's abortion.

Ms. X sat by her. "She was turning and tossing," Eurice's friend told Newsday. She couldn't really talk. Then the sheets came off her and I saw blood pouring out of her."

Over the next 2 1/2 hours, Eurice bled so heavily that Penalzer became alarmed and asked Zelikman to do something. Zelikman told her that the bleeding was normal and that she should put an ice bag on the patient. He then left the facility for his home a few miles away, leaving Penalzer to care for the patients in recovery.

Penalzer continued to be concerned about Eurice's bleeding, and tried repeatedly to reach Zelikman at his home, but couldn't contact him. Finally, at 4:02 pm, she called an ambulance, telling the 911 operator, "I have a woman who is bleeding and unconscious and in shock."

While awaiting EMS, staff at the fake clinic scrambled to hide Eurice's file.

Her Final Days

Size difference between an 11-week fetus
and a 19-week fetus

The ambulance crew found Penalzer performing CPR on Eurice, who was in shock. They were able to restore her breathing and transport her to Long Island College Hospital, where an emergency hysterectomy was done. It was determined that Eurice had actually been at least 19 weeks pregnant. Eurice had a perforated uterus and severed abdominal artery. She had lost approximately 75% of her blood.

Eurice survived the surgery but remained comatose and was put on life support.

Word spread in the Ghanaian community, and Eddie Agboh went to the hospital to check on his friend about a week after the abortion. "She didn't resemble the person I knew before," he told Newsweek. "Her face was swollen, her eyes were protruding. It was very pathetic. I came home and called friends and told them she was in a complete mess, that she wouldn't last long."

In the early morning of January 15, Eddie Agboh got a call from the hospital. His friend was dead. Her cause of death was multiple organ failure.

Closing the Book on Eurice

While her body lay at the Ortiz Funeral Home in Brooklyn, Eddie Agboh and others raised money to send her body home for burial. They were able to gather more than $10,000 for Agboh to take Eurice's body back to Accra. The funeral there was a sideshow, with people pouring in to be part of the scenario. "Somebody's child having traveled overseas and the body having been brought back under serous circumstances. Everybody had an inquisitiveness in the whole affair. The mysteries surrounding the whole thing became a little bit inviting. The hall was jammed."

Ms. X was haunted by the experience, unable to sleep, brought back again and again to the moment that a nurse pulled Eurice's blood-drenched shirt off her body and handed it to her friend. Stunned and confused, Mrs. X dropped the bloody shirt in the trash.

She had nothing good to say about staff at the fake clinic. "I felt if I hadn't been there, they would have wrapped her body and thrown it in the garbage."

Zelikman, a 54-year old Soviet immigrant who received his medical training in Leningrad, had been in the United States since 1979. He was faulted by the medical board for allowing non-medical staff to practice medicine, abandoning patients other than Eurice, failing to keep medical records, and failing to take adequate medical histories or perform appropriate blood tests for his abortion patients. His license was suspended. The medical board noted that he had allowed an unlicensed assistant to administer general anesthesia in his clinic on four occasions. The Brooklyn District Attorney investigated the death, but no charges were ever filed.

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