An ex-con who was put back on the streets this past summer has been busted in the stray-bullet slaying of a Brooklyn mom that took place just 22 days later, cops said Tuesday.
Oliver Case, 29, was charged late Monday with murder, attempted murder and weapons charges in the shooting of Limose Thomas, 54, in Crown Heights, the NYPD said.
Thomas — a home-health aide from Haiti and a mother of four — was shot twice in the chest while walking home on St. Johns Place near Rochester Avenue around 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 19.
Thomas was just steps away from her apartment when she was gunned down.
Thomas was not the intended target of the gunfire, which was aimed at a 30-year-old man with whom Case had fought earlier in the day, law-enforcement sources said Tuesday.
That man was shot in the arm and refused to cooperate with investigators.
Two days after the incident, then-Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the anti-crime Guardian Angels patrol group, offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Thomas’s killer.
Case was identified with the help of an anonymous tipster and nabbed in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, around 6:40 p.m. Monday, cops said.
Sliwa said Tuesday that no one had yet claimed the reward, and he called Case’s capture a “great sign.”
Sliwa also said he was hopeful that the pace of NYPD arrests and prosecutions — which he said were slowed by attrition in its Detective Bureau — would speed up under mayor-elect Eric Adams.
Case was sprung from prison on parole July 28 after serving about 10 years of a 13-year sentence for attempted assault, according to official online records.
That conviction stemmed from a May 2010 incident in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, during which a 21-year-old man was shot in the leg, law-enforcement sources said.
Case was scheduled to remain on parole until July 28, 2026.
He ignored journalists’ questions as he was escorted out of the 77th Precinct stationhouse in handcuffs, leg irons and a black sweatsuit shortly after 6 p.m. Tuesday.
Two NYPD detectives put him in an unmarked police car and drove him off for arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court.
Additional reporting by Joe Marino
