Mother of beach-slay victim  received eerie text from daughter after she disappeared

The mother of a Queens woman whose bound body washed ashore over the weekend  received a single, startling text from her daughter’s phone the day she  disappeared, the Daily News has learned.

“Mom am fine,” said the cryptic message from Marisha Cheong’s phone sent  hours after the 24-year-old went missing Dec. 19. “I just need Little time to  think. Am good.”

But Bibi Ali believes the text came from someone who had a hand in her  daughter’s death.

Courtesy Cheong Family

Bibi Ali (left), 46, mother of  Marisha Cheong, says she's convinced Marisha Cheong's boyfriend knows what  happened to her. 

“It’s not her,” the mourning mother insisted Tuesday. “I know in my heart it  wasn’t from her. She never addressed me as mom. Wherever we are, whatever it  was, she called me ‘mommy.’”

In more than a dozen heartbreaking messages that followed, Ali begged Cheong  to call her.

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Text messages from mother Bibi Ali  and her daughter Marisha Cheong after she disappeared. 

 

“Marisha call me I love u please call me,” wrote Ali that evening, the day  Cheong was last seen following a fight with her live-in boyfriend.

But her desperate pleas were never answered.

Cheong’s bruised body washed ashore in the Rockaways on Saturday, close to  the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. She was wearing a pair of pajamas and one black  Ugg boot. Her hands and feet were bound with rope.

 

Ali says that her daughter, Marisha,  did not call her mom and doesn't believe responses to her texts came from  Cheong. 

 

The city's medical examiner has yet to determine the cause of death.

Cops have interviewed Latchman Balkaran, 26, Cheong's boyfriend. The have  not named him a suspect. Still, Ali maintains that Balkaran is hiding  something.

 

Bibi Ali continued to message her  daughter Marisha Cheong, but did not receive further responses. 

“Every time somebody talks to him he has a different story,” Ali said.

“I don’t understand why they think I would do something like that,” Balkaran  told The News on Monday. “They know how I am.”

Ali also said that police are examining surveillance video captured near  Cheong’s Jamaica home the day she went missing. It shows a woman escorting  Cheong out of her house, Ali said.

Funeral plans remain in limbo. Police have yet to turn over Cheong’s body to  her family. And her father, who lives in Guyana, is trying to travel to the  U.S.

For the moment, Ali is grieving alone. “I’m supposed to be marrying off my  daughter,” she said, “not burying her.”

idejohn@nydailynews.com and  skavanaugh@nydailynews.com