The woman arrested in Florida in the execution-style shooting of a Brooklyn woman over the summer has been extradited to New York City to face criminal charges.
Police charged 42-year-old Claudia Banton of Georgia on Thursday with murder and criminal possession of a weapon for allegedly shooting Delia Johnson in the back of the head as she chatted with people by a stoop in August. The motive for the killing remains unclear at this point.
Banton, who also goes by the names Claudia Williams and Kiesha Brown, was picked up by police in Jacksonville, Florida, earlier this month --- more than three months after the killing in Crown Heights that was caught on camera.
Surveillance video of the shooting previously released by police showed a woman in black leggings get out of a double-parked white sedan and casually shoot Johnson in the head as she chatted with a group of people by a stoop.
The shooter calmly walked back to the car with her purse on her shoulder and drove off, police said. Johnson was pronounced dead at a hospital.
Information on an attorney for Banton wasn't immediately available.
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The 42-year-old victim's brother told the Daily News at the time he thought the shooter followed Johnson from a neighborhood funeral that both had attended.
“She was at a funeral earlier in the evening for an old neighborhood friend to pay her respects, and then this happened,” Mathis Johnson, 47, told the paper. “It was horrible. That lady executed my sister.”
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Family members said Johnson was an entrepreneur and the mother of a 17-year-old daughter. Her mother, Delia Barry, said after her death, "I'm in so much pain, I'm numb...trying my best to hold myself up but the slaughter, that's what it was."
