Grandkids are supposed to steal your heart — not your house.
A Brooklyn woman allegedly hijacked her grandmother’s longtime home by forging the elder’s signature on a fake deed and filing it with the city — then took out a $399,000 mortgage on the property, according to a $5 million lawsuit.
Leonita Arbuckle, 77, bought her two-story, multi-family Flatbush house with her husband Selwyn in 1972 for $31,650, dutifully paying off the mortgage in 1995.
But the retired nurse got a letter in May claiming the property had been transferred to her granddaughter, Jaishree Arbuckle-Pierre, for $1, the grandmother charges in her Brooklyn Supreme Court lawsuit.
“You don’t expect that from your kids,” she told The Post.
Arbuckle says she never gave her home to the younger woman, who was raised and lived in the home until she graduated from high school in 2004, according to court papers.
The apparently ungrateful granddaughter has a history of fraud, legal records show.
In 2012, Arbuckle-Pierre was working as a nurse at Kings County Hospital when she was arrested for being part of an identity-theft scheme, stealing Social Security numbers from coworkers and using the information to open up credit cards, Brooklyn federal prosecutors said.
She pleaded guilty in 2013 and was sentenced to two years behind bars, followed by supervised release.
It’s not the first time Arbuckle-Pierre targeted her grandmother: prosecutors noted in 2014 that she’d stolen from the older woman. The grandmother, whose husband died in 2017, never pressed charges.
In 2019, the granddaughter pleaded guilty to violating the terms of her release after she was caught in a Long Island parking lot with a gun, records show. She was sentenced to another 12 months in jail.
Arbuckle “does not know if the forger or anyone is making payments on the fraudulent mortgage or if she is defaulting, leading to a possible foreclosure,” Arbuckle said in court papers.
Despite it all, Arbuckle said she’s not willing to let the alleged transgressions destroy their relationship.
“How mad could I be? It’s done,” she said, noting that Arbuckle-Pierre’s teen son still lives with her in the home.
“He doesn’t know we’re threatened to go live out on the street,” she said.
She’s fighting to regain ownership of her home, but won’t give up on her granddaughter either.
“I’m not going to destroy my relationship … she’s going to be my granddaughter til the day she die,” Arbuckle said.