Michael Foster, 58, was ordered held without bail June 19 in Bronx Criminal Court after prosecutors said he ambushed and shot his niece, 39-year-old Julia Anderson, just before midnight on June 16 outside the Mount Vernon group home where she worked. Anderson was stepping into her car when Foster fired two rounds, killing her over a bitter inheritance dispute involving the family’s two-story home, valued at roughly $568,000.
“This is the second person he has killed, Your Honor,” Assistant District Attorney Burim Namani told Judge Cary Fischer at the arraignment. Foster pleaded not guilty to murder, manslaughter, and weapon possession.
Thirty-seven years earlier, Foster gunned down 19-year-old Calvin Reed on South 14th Avenue near West 3rd Street in Mount Vernon as Reed walked home from his job as a supermarket stock clerk on Feb. 9, 1988. Police at the time called the shooting drug-related. Reed was a bodybuilder and, by all accounts from those who knew him, a young man going places. Foster was arrested roughly three years later, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and criminal use of a firearm in 1991 just as his trial was set to begin, and served seven years and three months before being paroled in 1999. His parole ended in 2003.
The two killings occurred within a half-mile of each other.
Reed’s son was 13 months old when his father was shot in the back of the head. That boy grew up to be Ray Rice — Rutgers star, Baltimore Ravens second-round pick, three-time Pro Bowl running back, and later the central figure in one of the ugliest scandals the NFL has ever swallowed. In February 2014, surveillance video captured Rice knocking his then-fiancée unconscious in an Atlantic City hotel elevator. The footage ended his career and forced the league to overhaul its domestic violence policy.
Rice has spoken about his father’s murder throughout his public life. “I have found out that he was a great guy, well known in the community,” Rice told the Baltimore Sun in 2008. “He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot in the back of the head. It was a tragedy, especially for my grandparents, because he was one of two children, the baby of the family.”
Rice’s mother, Janet, raised him and three younger siblings alone in a New Rochelle public housing complex known as The Hollow. A cousin, Shaun Rice-Nichols — a rapper who went by S.U.P.E. — moved in after his own mother died and became a father figure to Rice. Then Rice-Nichols died in a car crash in California in March 1998, alongside his fiancée. Rice was 11.
“Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to have your real dad,” Rice said in a 2010 article on the Ravens’ website. “Just for a walk in the park or just recapping our lives. That’s the part that makes me think.”
The property dispute between Foster and Anderson had been escalating. Foster accused his niece of forging his signature on a deed transferring the family home to her, leading to Anderson’s arrest last year. Those charges were dropped months later. Anderson then filed a pro se lawsuit against Westchester County alleging malicious prosecution, claiming the district attorney brought charges “not through evidence or probable cause but through the unvetted statements of a known felon with a violent criminal history and a personal vendetta.” That suit was still pending when she was killed.
In May, Rice posted on Facebook celebrating the completion of his Rutgers degree — a promise he’d made to his father’s parents, James and Amelia Reed. “I want to acknowledge my father, Calvin Reed, who was tragically shot and killed when I was just 13 months old,” Rice wrote. “I never got the chance to truly know him, but I carry his name, his blood, and his spirit with me every day.”
Attempts to reach Rice for comment on Foster’s latest arrest were unsuccessful.
Yahoo Sports / New York Daily News