Brutes robbed elderly widow of money for late husband’s tombstone: cops

An 89-year-old widow was robbed of money she’d been saving to buy her late husband’s tombstone in a violent attack at her Manhattan apartment, police said Thursday.

Sources said two brutes followed Maximina Osorio to her home in the Jacob Riis Houses on East 10th Street near Avenue D around 11:45 a.m. Saturday.

The elderly woman told The Post she had just been out grocery shopping and was unlocking the door to her fourth-floor apartment when “two young men” she’d never seen before approached.

“They didn’t say anything,” she recalled. “One of them pushed me, he covered my eyes and he told me to be quiet. Then he pushed me inside.”

Police said one of the men knocked her to the floor, shouting, “Where’s the money?”

“They dragged me the way you drag a sack across the floor,” she said.

Osorio said she had cash in a drawer in her bedroom — and one of the men fled with $5,000, though she believes it could be more.

“It was almost $7,000. I don’t count it,” she explained. “I bring it from the bank and put it there. I didn’t think this was going to happen.”

The victim, who suffered a sore neck and back, told police she’d been keeping the money to buy a headstone for her husband, 77-year-old Salvador Gonzalez, who had passed in December 2017.

He is buried at a cemetery in New Jersey.

“I said, ‘What’s this?’ I’ve been here 50 years and I never had this happen,” she said.

Osorio, who has no children and lives alone, said she screamed over and over again for help but no one came. She got up and called police herself.

She was treated at a hospital and released.

Police released video and images of one of the suspects, described as 5 feet 8, 160 pounds, with a light complexion and a full beard.

He was last seen wearing blue jeans, a blue hoodie, blue T-shirt, white sneakers, backpack and a black and blue Philadelphia Flyers baseball cap.

Additional reporting by Ruth Weissmann