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).
Having a violent history that included killing his grandmother at the age of 14, a man from New York is now facing an 18-year prison sentence for murdering his girlfriend.
Recently, Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark revealed that Waheed Foster, 44, was sentenced for the killing of Jessica Miller, aged 41. He accepted his punishment after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter and third-degree assault. This sentence is to be served consecutively to a 22-year prison term he was given for an unprovoked assault on a commuter in Queens shortly after Miller’s death.
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.
