While during Sukkot Los Angeles’ Jews were dwelling in their temporary shelters, a continent away, the story of Sarah Cheiker, an elderly victim of a con that took her Fairfax District home – was demonstrating just how fragile a home can be in the City of Angels.
Cheiker, 91, who, according to her neighbor for 35 years, Jim Caccavo, is Jewish, lived for decades – first with her mother Fanny, then alone – in a small Spanish-style house on South Edinburgh Avenue, a part of the city that remains heavily Jewish.
But in 2008, she disappeared, Caccavo told the Los Angeles Times. Though Caccavo filed a missing person report, it was not until four years later, that FBI agents who were knocking on doors in the Fairfax neighborhood, revealed that Cheiker had been found alive “abandoned and alone in a weathered cabin near the coast of Maine.”
“I was shocked. We figured she was dead,” Caccavo told the Times.
How did Cheiker get to Maine?
Years earlier she had befriended three individuals who had come to her door: twins Nicholas and Barbara Davis, and their godson, Jonathan Stevens. Neighbors recalled that they had taken her to appointments and shopping.
Soon, they took her for much more than that.
After a fire that damaged her house, the three let Cheiker move in with them.
Records show that the partially damaged home, which is located in an area where several smaller homes have been torn down and replaced with much larger ones, was sold to a developer for $712,000 and bulldozed in 2008. Sometime before that, Cheiker, the two Davises and Stevens left town.
Jim Caccavo and Sarah Cheiker at an assisted living facility in Maine in 2012.
They apparently were on the road until 2011, when, according to various sources, the two Davises were arrested and accused of “transporting an elderly woman across the country between 2009 and 2011,” and then depositing Cheiker in a cabin near the coast in Edgecomb, Me.
“When they found her, they said that she had spoiled fast food, one light bulb in the cabin that was burned out, and it was very hot,” Caccavo told CBS Los Angeles.
Papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in California, in February of 2014 show that Nicholas Davis – who had been given guardianship over Ms. Cheiker by California courts, and also given power of attorney over her assets – admitted that he had liquidated them, “including at least $600,000 from the sale of her home.” Cheiker’s funds were invested in properties in California, New York and other states, as well as six properties in Maine, the record shows.
As to how Cheiker wound up in a shack in Maine, the record also shows that Davis along with Stevens, drove Cheiker to a hotel, where he told the manager that she was a “middle-aged artist who wanted to be left alone.”
All three entered no contest pleas in Lincoln County Superior Court. Nicholas and Barbara Davis each pled no contest to one felony charge of intentionally endangering the welfare of a dependent and were sentenced to three years in prison, all suspended with Nicholas Davis ordered to pay $5,000 to Cheiker as restitution.
Stevens was sentenced to 364 days confinement, which also was suspended.
In an aftermath of the swindle, Cheiker, destitute, and with health care issues, was placed in a 74 bed cealth care center in Fryberg, Me. (population approx 3500), where Caccavo paid her a visit in 2012. “Sarah told me she definitely did not sell her house,” he told the Times.
“She is now a ward of the state of Maine,” he wrote in an email to the Jewish Journal.
When a Jewish Journal reporter called to talk to Cheiker, he was told that no patient information could be given out. “You need to understand our position,” the center’s representative said.
In the City of Los Angeles, where the alleged swindle took place, charges apparently have not been filed.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.