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Background: Waheed Foster (New York Post/YouTube). Inset: Elizabeth Gomes, the woman Foster attacked in a New York subway station after strangling his girlfriend, Jessica Miller, to death (WABC).
A New York man with a history of violence, including killing his grandmother when he was 14, will spend 18 years in prison for strangling his girlfriend to death.
Waheed Foster, 44, learned his fate in the death of Jessica Miller, 41, Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark announced in a Friday press release. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and third-degree assault. The sentence will run consecutively to a 22-year sentence he received for an unprovoked attack that seriously wounded a commuter in Queens weeks after Miller’s body was discovered.
The events leading to Miller’s death happened on Aug. 4, 2022, when she visited the defendant at a mental health facility in the Bronx, prosecutors said. The defendant entered the building with Miller, signed in at the front desk, and went to his room. Later that evening, Foster left the building and never returned. An employee conducting a wellness check in Foster’s room two days later discovered Miller’s body.
Before a final determination of death was determined for Miller the following month, Foster was in custody in a case in Queens in which he punched and kicked commuter Elizabeth Gomes at the Howard Beach-JFK Airport subway station in the head in an unprovoked attack as she was on her way to work.
The attack left Gomes with severe injuries, including the loss of her right eye.
In a statement to the court at the sentencing for the subway attack, Gomes spoke about the trauma.
“Every time I look in the mirror, I always remember,” the statement said.
“I still feel afraid when I get on the train sometimes,” Gomes said in an interview with the New York Post.
Foster spoke out about the attack in a jailhouse interview with the New York Daily News.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said it was a miracle Gomes survived.
“I wasn’t trying to kill her,” Foster said. “I was just trying to give a real good a– whooping … If I stomped her in the face, she’d be dead.”
At Foster’s sentencing in that attack, Queens Supreme Court Judge Ira Margulis said he shouldn’t have been out on the streets.
“He should have been in a mental hospital, a state hospital being treated there,” Margulis said, the New York Post reported. “Because he showed time after time when he was released and taken off his meds, he continued to commit crimes.”
Foster’s criminal history includes the murder of his 82-year-old foster grandmother in 1995 when he was 14, local ABC affiliate WABC reported. Years later, he stabbed his sister with a screwdriver, the outlet reported.
In 2010, he attacked workers at a psychiatric outpatient treatment center after having been diagnosed with schizophrenia, paranoid type, and anti-social personality disorder. On June 7, 2010, Foster walked into a third-floor office and stabbed one employee with a knife, then struck two others before fleeing the facility, according to court documents.