Ma ‘left to die’

$$-hungry son cut care: kin

An incapacitated woman is slowly dying in a Bronx nursing home — and her desperate family has gone to court in hope of restoring nourishment they believe will bring her back to a normal life.

Leonie LaMont’s family wants a state appeals court to restore water, food and other life support to the 65-year-old former nurse. They say her deadbeat son agreed to cut her life support to get her money.

“You can’t just put this woman down like that,” said Marian McPherson, LaMont’s aunt. “I hate to see her die. She can get better and live, I see that. She’s not a vegetable.”

McPherson, 66, said in court papers that LaMont (inset) tried to talk to her when she visited the He- brew Home for the Aged this month and that a nurse confided her niece “is not brain dead.”

But last week, the home removed her feeding tube.

“The son wants her dead,” said Sandra Prowley, a lawyer for McPherson and other relatives. “It’s all about money.”

LaMont immigrated to the US from Jamaica in 1967 and was a nurse at BronxLebanon Hospital for many years to support her son, Donovan Johnson, 45.

“He kept pushing her around asking her for money, money, money,” McPherson said. “She would say to me, ‘I’m so fed up with my son. He don’t want to work.’ ”

A state Supreme Court judge last month denied the family’s request that LaMont be fed. The family took the case to the Appellate Division.

McPherson, in an appeal to the court, asked that someone visit LaMont before making a medical determination.

“My niece is not dead, and her life is in your hands,” she wrote.

A lawyer for the Hebrew Home said it was following “well-settled law” that lets family members make decisions for someone who is incapacitated if there is no living will.

Johnson did not return a request for comment.