Tram Thuy Nguyen came to New York about eight months ago to be with her fiancé, her former boss said, and her favorite topic in recent months had been her coming marriage.

“She was extremely excited,” said the former boss, Chris Morley, who had worked with Ms. Nguyen at Bien Realty near the apartment that she shared with her fiancé on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village.

Ms. Nguyen, 37, known to friends as Tina, who recently went to work for the real-estate agency Keller Williams NYC, was killed on Tuesday evening after she was struck by plywood fencing blown from a construction site as she walked along a street not far from her home, the police said on Wednesday.

The episode occurred around 5:50 p.m., the police said, as Ms. Nguyen walked on the sidewalk in front of 175 West 12th Street. She was struck by a piece of plywood that was blown off a security fence surrounding the area where a 200-unit condominium complex, the Greenwich Lane, is rising on the site of the former campus of St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, the police said. The force of the impact then slammed Ms. Nguyen, who was using her cellphone when she was struck, against the wall.