Man ‘strangled mum-of-two dead and left her kids to find her body’ | US News

A man who fatally strangled a mother-of-two while her children were in the home has been sentenced four years later.

Asun Thomas, 49, attacked Luz Miriam Perez, 40, inside her apartment in the Bronx in October 2019 and then ran away, said Bronx County District Attorney Darcel Clark.

Perez’s two-year-old daughter and five-year-old son discovered their mother dead with head and body injuries and were left alone in the home for a day, according to The New York Times.

They made peanut butter sandwiches to subsist, reported the New York Daily News at the time.

A passerby noticed Perez’s kids banging on the windows of the apartment on 187th Street for help and called 911.

The boy unlatched the widow after he and his sister spent possibly more than a day trapped, a police detective told WNBC at the time.

The children were not harmed, and taken to hospital to be evaluated. They were taken to Perez’s relatives.

Perez’s body did not have stab wounds, causing investigators to initially be unsure of her cause of death.

Thomas surrendered to police on Christmas Eve of that year and said he had been living at the Peter Jay Sharp Center for Opportunity, a housing facility with about 400 beds in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. He was charged with murder and held without bail at the Vernon C Bain Center, court and city records indicated.

He was sentenced on October 12 of this year to 25 years in prison for a first-degree manslaughter charge in the killing of Perez.

Thomas and Perez were acquaintances, but the details of their relationship were not immediately known.

Perez’s son, now 9 years old, testified against Thomas to ‘get justice’, the New York Post reported.

Thomas had a previous manslaughter conviction from 2000 and was freed on parole in 2016. He served 16 of his 20-year sentence from that case.

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