The ex-con uncle of the woman shot to death outside the Bronx group home where she worked has been arrested for her murder — a killing sparked by a nasty feud over the inheritance of the home they shared, police sources said Thursday.
Michael Foster, who once served eight years in prison for manslaughter, was arrested Wednesday and charged with murdering 39-year-old Julia Anderson earlier this week, cops said.
Foster, 58, and Anderson lived in the family’s two-story Mount Vernon home with Anderson’s mother, police said. Foster was upset his niece had inherited the family home, which, according to online records, has an estimated value of $568,000.
The dispute led to Anderson’s arrest last year after Foster accused her of forging his signature on a deed for the property, according to a Journal News report. The charges against Anderson were dropped months later, according to the outlet.
Anderson then filed a pro se lawsuit against Westchester County alleging malicious prosecution. She claims in the suit that the DA brought charges against her “not through evidence or probable cause but through the unvetted statements of a known felon with a violent criminal history and a personal vendetta.”
The lawsuit was pending at the time of her murder.
Foster kept his head down and did not comment as he was led out of the 47th Precinct stationhouse in handcuffs and placed into an unmarked NYPD vehicle Wednesday night.
Cops arrested Foster after searching the Mount Vernon home, where police found a revolver, a semi-automatic pistol and a Bushmaster AR-15 assault rifle, according to a criminal complaint. NYPD crime scene detectives could be seen coming out of the address with paper evidence bags Wednesday evening.
Investigators also obtained video of Foster leaving the Mount Vernon home where he lived with the victim, traveling by scooter to her workplace and lurking outside by her vehicle, before firing two shots as she got into her Jeep, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Burim Namani said at the suspect’s arraignment.
Witnesses told cops they saw a man fleeing on a scooter after shots rang out. Foster threw away the scooter after the slaying, prosecutors said.
He was ordered held without bail after pleading not guilty to murder, manslaughter and weapon possession before Bronx Criminal Court Judge Cary Fischer.
Four decades ago, Foster was arrested for fatally shooting 19-year-old Calvin Reed on S. 16th Ave. in Mount Vernon during some kind of drug beef — less than half a mile from where Anderson was also shot in the head 38 years later.
“This is the second person he has killed, your honor,” Namani told the judge on Thursday.
Foster was arrested almost three years after the Feb. 9, 1988, slaying and charged with murder and weapon possession. He was just about to go to trial in 1991 when he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and criminal use of a firearm.
He served eight years in prison before being paroled in 1999, state Department of Corrections records show. His parole ended in 2003.
In 2009, Foster was arrested for weapon possession in the Bronx when cops found a gravity knife on him, police said.
A few minutes before midnight Monday, Anderson was seated inside her black Jeep outside the group home where she worked near Murdock and Nereid Aves. in Wakefield when a gunman shot her through the front passenger-side window.
After being shot, Anderson stumbled out of her Jeep and was found lying on the ground outside of her vehicle, police said. Medics rushed her to Jacobi Medical Center but she could not be saved.
“I spoke to the doctors down in the Bronx and they told me that it was three bullets,” her mother, Beverley Patterson, told the Daily News Tuesday. “One went straight into her heart — it hit her arm and from the arm goes there.”
Anderson had worked with disabled people for more than a decade, relatives said. She was three weeks away from her 40th birthday.
Institutes of Applied Human Dynamics, the non-profit that runs the group home where Anderson worked, did not return a request for comment.
Patterson said Anderson usually got home from work a little after midnight. She expected to hear her daughter enter their home early Tuesday and became concerned when she didn’t hear anything.
“She’s always making some kind of little noise or something so I know she’s home,” Patterson, 62, said. “I didn’t hear it after 12. Then my other daughter, my younger daughter came and she told me … My heart felt like it was gonna come out.”
Police say Anderson had no criminal history.
“God have to take care of everything,” the victim’s mother said. “He’s the one that’s in control and take care of everything that happens. You can’t walk around and hate people. You have to love them in a sense. Even if they do something wrong like that, which is not good.”
With John Annese
