Metro

Beach body feud: Beau & mom at odds over who killed co-ed found in Breezy Point

The boyfriend of a pretty co-ed whose bound and decomposed body washed up on a Queens beach admitted yesterday the two had “relationship issues” the day she dropped out of sight.

Latchman Balkaran, 26, said he exchanged heated text messages with ambitious LIU student Marisha Cheong, 24, on Dec. 19 — the day she went missing.

But Balkaran — a part-time deliveryman and aspiring filmmaker — strongly denied any role in her disappearance or death.

He said some of the messages looked suspicious because his gal pal of four years didn’t use her favorite pet names.

“It didn’t sound like her. Certain words she used weren’t the same to me, like ‘baby’ or ‘stinky-boo-boo,’ ” he said

He thinks someone else — perhaps her killer — sent them while pretending to be the striking brunette.

Cops grilled Balkaran after Cheong vanished and again Sunday — the day after a passerby found her body on a Breezy Point beach, her hands and legs bound.

Police consider him a “person of interest,” but he has not been charged.

Cheong’s distraught mother, Bibi Ali, believes she also got phony messages from someone posing as her daughter after she disappeared — and believes they came from Balkaran.

“She texted me but it wasn’t her texts,’’ Ali said. “She texted, ‘Mom, I’m fine,’ but she [always] called me ‘Mommy.’ I know in my heart it wasn’t her — somebody was using her phone.’’

She said Balkaran knew her daughter’s iPhone password and was controlling and jealous.

“He was obsessive about her,’’ said a tearful Ali, 46, from her home in Valley Stream, LI.

The anguished mom said her daughter — who attended LIU in Brooklyn for three years and was heading for a class when she vanished — dreamed of becoming an interior designer.

“She was so pretty. She didn’t get to live her life yet. She didn’t deserve this. They threw her away like trash. They left my baby like she was nothing,” she sobbed.

Ali also said she fears her daughter may have been tied up and dumped in the surf because her killer knew she could not swim.

“She didn’t know how to swim — and he [Balkaran] knows that,” Ali said.

Ali said Balkaran told the family that, after five years together, Cheong suddenly dumped him — by text — before taking off with a mystery man.

“He said she ran away with somebody else, but she’s not that kind of person,’’ her mother said.

Ali said her suspicions grew when the boyfriend stopped talking to the family after her disappearance — and did not even help search for her.

Also yesterday, a neighbor across the street said an unemotional Balkaran came to him three days after the disappearance and calmly asked him if he had any surveillance video showing the entrance to their apartment at 8915 145th St. in Jamaica.

“I didn’t know she was missing until her [boyfriend] asked me if I had a video camera outside the house,” said Charles Persaud, 52, who had no video. “He wasn’t that upset.”

“I was trying to keep my composure because I didn’t want people to freak out,” Balkaran explained when asked about the bizarre visit.

Police and the victim’s family viewed surveillance video that showed her with an unidentified companion leaving the home she shared with Balkaran, law-enforcement sources said.

“She left of her own free will, alive and well at that point,” a source said.

Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Kirstan Conley