Devil on wheels

Fiend steals disabled gal’s powered chair

Another heartless New York thief is rolling along the on-ramp to hell — this one in a wheelchair he stole from a disabled woman.

A perfectly ambulatory man (left) is being sought by police for zooming off with the $2,000 electric wheelchair of a multiple-sclerosis sufferer in Brooklyn.

“I’m angry,” the victim, Margaret Leon (inset), told The Post from her Sheepshead Bay apartment. “Why? Just why? Why would he take somebody’s wheelchair?”

Leon, 36, had parked the wheelchair outside Weichert Realtors on 86th Street in Gravesend on Saturday so she could go inside to use the bathroom.

When she returned minutes later, it was gone.

Surveillance video from outside the storefront shows a man in a hat, sunglasses and a bulky jacket saunter up to the chair.

He sits down, places his feet on the foot rests, and then zips away.

A car thief, Leon could almost understand, she said. But grand theft wheelchair?

“I was shocked,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do now.’ I was stunned.”

“He’s a really messed-up person,” she added. “He has to be cruel. He’s a cruel person.

“I saw the video. And he looked around and looked around, and then he sat in my chair and drove off.”

“You have no kindness,” Leon added, addressing the man who stole her independence.

The thief joins a creeps’ gallery of crooks who recently have preyed on the disabled and elderly.

They include a fiend in East Harlem who reached into the bra of a 93-year-old woman in a wheelchair in September and snatched her $600 in pension cash.

Leon was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis as a teenager in 1998. She began using a wheelchair 10 years ago. Only in the past year has she needed it daily, whenever she goes outside.

“My legs aren’t good and I can’t walk after a block or two,” she explained.

She had her Titan powered wheelchair for only two months. Complicating matters, her insurance company is changing owners, and has told her she must wait until at least February for a replacement, she said.

“I have to stay home until I get a chair,” she said.

“On Sundays I usually go and see my parents and have dinner, and other days, I have coffee with my friends.

“This changed everything. I haven’t been able to go shopping or go out.”

The lesson learned? Never leave anything unattended in New York, she said. Not even for five minutes.

“Even a wheelchair,” she said.