She’s a 28-year-old gold digger with a heart of steel.
As if marrying and then fleec ing a physically and mentally handicapped man weren’t enough, Cher Thompson of Manhattan turned her sights on an other helpless victim — a nearly deaf, 90-year-old widower with dementia, authorities said yester day.
“This is one of really the most horrific elder-abuse cases we’ve seen,” said Dan Reingold, president of The Hebrew Home in The Bronx, where Thompson’s first alleged victim is now living.
Authorities said the heartless heartbreaker — who managed to postpone her arraignment in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday by collapsing after she spotted photographers — made off with more than $200,000.
The well-heeled brunette alle gedly first targeted Howard Zeimer, 64, who was disabled in a car accident years ago.
“He had been living with his mother, and she died and left money to him,” Reingold told The Post.
Zeimer began “going in and out of a bank on 86th Street, kind of to give himself something to do. [Thompson] spotted him and hit on him,” he said. “He had proba bly never been with a woman be fore, and he thought he was in love. She talked about wanting to live together and get married.
“He’s a lovely, lovely guy, but he suffered from a traumatic brain injury, so he was not com petent,” Reingold said. “He was not really in a position to show judgment.”
The pair married in a civil cere mony in 2008 — and Thompson promptly started draining her victim’s life-insurance annuities, authorities said. Reingold said she made off with around $100,000.
“She said she needed money for a so-called brother and a so-called nephew, who we now believe were a husband and children,” Reingold said, although authorities could not confirm that Thompson is a bigamist, to boot.
“After she stole [Zeimer’s] money, he began losing a lot of weight and sold soda cans on the street for nickels to make ends meet. His doctor noticed he was losing weight and realized he was being defrauded and abused.”
Investigators later found that Thompson had been two-timing Zeimer with ailing 90-year-old John Grant, whom she also allegedly bilked.
Officials say the sleazy siren swiped at least $60,000 from Zeimer. She says it was a loan for her Canal Street clothing business.
A disoriented Grant was found by a reporter yesterday wandering the hall outside his tiny, West Village apartment.
“I met her two years ago. I don’t know how I met her,” Grant said of Thompson. “I don’t know what, if anything, she’s taken from me.”
His niece, Patricia McGuire, said her uncle, a former Marine, apparently met Thompson after his beloved wife of nearly 62 years died in 2008.
“He started to mention he went out with ‘the boys and girls’ . . . and blowing me off for lunches,” said McGuire, a retired nurse at St. Vincent’s Hospital. “Then one day, he said, ‘The boys and girls were here. They were rifling through my papers.’ I thought at first he was making it up.”
But the niece said Thompson’s scheme unraveled when a bank worker called to say Grant told him he wanted to put the younger woman in charge of his finances.
She said her uncle is heading to a nursing home in two weeks.
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton, Rebecca Harshbarger, Amber Sutherland and Jamie Schram