A New York man who has a history of violence, including murdering his grandmother when he was 14, will serve 18 years in prison for strangling his girlfriend to death.
Waheed Foster, 44, learned his fate in the death of Jessica Miller, 41, according to a press release issued by Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark on Friday.
He admitted to first-degree manslaughter and third-degree assault.
The sentence will follow a 22-year sentence he received for an unprovoked attack that seriously injured a commuter in Queens weeks after Miller’s body was discovered.
Miller died on August 4, 2022, after visiting the defendant at a mental health facility in the Bronx, according to prosecutors.
The defendant entered the building alongside Miller, signed in at the front desk, and proceeded to his room.
Later that evening, Foster left the building and never returned. Two days later, an employee conducting a wellness check in Foster’s room found Miller’s body.
Before Miller’s death was determined the following month, Foster was in custody in a Queens case in which he punched and kicked commuter Elizabeth Gomes in the head at the Howard Beach-JFK Airport subway station on her way to work without provocation.
Gomes was severely injured in the attack, and she lost her right eye.
Gomes discussed the trauma in a statement to the court during the sentence hearing for the subway attack.
“Every time I look in the mirror, I always remember,” the statement read.
“I still feel afraid when I get on the train sometimes,” Gomes told the New York Post.
Foster spoke out about the attack during a jailhouse interview with the New York Daily News.
Melinda Katz, the Queens District Attorney, said it was a miracle Gomes survived.
“I wasn’t trying to kill her,” Foster explained. “I was 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 stated that he should not have been on the streets.
“He should have been in a mental hospital, a state hospital, being treated there,” Margulis told the New York Post. “Because he showed time after time when he was released and taken off his meds, he continued to commit crimes.”
Foster’s criminal record includes the murder of his 82-year-old foster grandmother in 1995, when he was 14, according to ABC affiliate WABC. Years later, the outlet reported that he stabbed his sister with a screwdriver.
He attacked employees at a psychiatric outpatient treatment center in 2010, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, paranoid type, and antisocial personality disorder.
According to court documents, Foster entered a third-floor office on June 7, 2010, and stabbed one employee with a knife before striking two others and fleeing the facility.
