US News

SIB’S PSYCHIC SEARCHING

A brother of the curly-haired beauty who disappeared after leaving a Chelsea club with an upstate sex fiend spent yesterday searching for her along the Hudson River on the advice of a psychic, relatives said.

Nicholas Garza traveled to New York from Texas after one of several “seers” his family consulted claimed that Laura Garza, 25, was “still alive but very near death, with pain in her chest. She was lying under a bridge where water feeds into the ocean,” according to her other brother, Ivan.

“I didn’t want her to go there because it’s such a big city,” said Laura’s mother, Elizabeth Esquivel.

“She would tell me, ‘Mommy I love the cities, and I want to learn and experience more.’ ”

She also doesn’t believe her daughter left the club with two men willingly because “she is not like that, they had to have put something in her drink.”

The heartbreaking hunt for the missing girl was under way as it was learned yesterday that the prime suspect in Laura’s disappearance – Michael Mele – is behind bars on a probation violation, and will stay there thanks to a fresh arrest warrant for public lewdness.

Mele, 23, is suspected in Garza’s disappearance because he drove her upstate from the Chelsea hotspot Marquee early last Wednesday, lied to cops about it, and reportedly tore up his carpet and frantically cleaned his home in a possible bid to destroy evidence, authorities said.

The lewdness charge stems from Mele’s alleged masturbating in the presence of a child at the Paramus Park Mall in 2005, said Paramus Police Chief Richard Cary. DNA, obtained for a probation violation related to a forcible-touching charge last year at the Palisades Mall, tied him to the crime, Cary said.

Ryan Perez, a 20-year-old whom Mele hired three years ago to work in an upstate Quiznos sandwich shop Mele owns, described the suspect as a stingy, lecherous hothead who routinely hit on comely female customers and occasionally threw temper tantrums.

“This guy liked to pick up girls at work,” Perez said of Mele. “He asked if they went to college – that was his cue to go talk to them. He’s pretty slick.”

Perez said when he began dating a co-worker who Mele was interested in, his boss became jealous and surly, and later fired the woman.

Perez, who himself later was fired, said Mele had a fierce temper, recalling a time Perez got to work late, infuriating Mele. “He punched the wall three times,” Perez said. “He said, ‘see those holes over there? I made those.’ ”

Additional reporting by Mary Nichols in Mission, Texas

dan.mangan@nypost.com