A relative of a woman shot to death outside the Bronx group home where she worked was charged with her murder, cops said Wednesday.
Michael Foster, 58, was arrested Wednesday and charged with murder, manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon for the fatal shooting of Julia Anderson two days earlier, according to law enforcement.
Foster kept his head down and did not comment as he was led out of the 47th Precinct station house in handcuffs and placed into an unmarked NYPD vehicle.
A police source described the suspect as a relative of the victim’s. He lived with Anderson and her mother at their home in Mount Vernon about a mile from where she was killed, cops said.
Anderson, 39, 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 on Monday.
A man on a moped was seen fleeing the scene, but it wasn’t immediately clear if he was the shooter or a witness.
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.
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 the victim 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.”
Institutes of Applied Human Dynamics, the non-profit that runs the group home where Anderson worked, did not return a request for comment.