The woman arrested in Florida in the execution-style shooting of a Brooklyn woman over the summer has been identified as Claudia Banton, who also goes by the names Claudia Williams and Kiesha Brown, police officials said Tuesday.
NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea confirmed a day ago the suspect was picked up by police in Jacksonville, nearly 1,000 miles from -- and more than three months after -- the crime scene in Crown Heights where she allegedly shot Delia Johnson in the back of the head as she chatted with people by a stoop in August.
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 Delia Johnson in the head as she chatted with a group of people by a Brooklyn 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. She is expected to be extradited from Florida at some point to face unspecified charges.
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A motive for the early August shooting remains unclear at this point.
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.
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“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.”
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."
