A Bronx man was sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison for the cold case killing of a pregnant woman, whom he strangled in front of her 5-year-old son, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark announced.
Gregory Fleetwood, 69, was sentenced by Bronx Supreme Court Justice Ralph Fabrizio 29 years after he choked the life out of 36-year-old Jasmine Porter on Feb. 5, 1996, Clark said. Fleetwood pleaded guilty on Dec. 10 to manslaughter for the killing.
Fleetwood was naked when he sat on top of Porter and strangled her inside the victim’s Davidson Ave. apartment near W. 176th St. in Morris Heights on Feb. 5, 1996, cops and prosecutors said.
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Obtained by Daily News Jasmine Porter.
Porter’s 5-year-old son struggled in vain to protect his mother, with Freeman swatting him aside as the child tried to push the killer off her body, according to Bronx Homicide Detective Robert Klein, who took over the investigation into the cold case murder in 2021.
The boy would spend two days alone with his mother’s lifeless body before being discovered.
“He locked himself in the apartment with her, tried to clean her nose, wipe the blood off her nose,” Derek Porter, the victim’s brother, said of his little nephew.
Shortly after being assigned Porter’s case, Klein learned about fingernail clippings taken from the victim that were never tested for DNA.
Those clippings formed the basis of a DNA profile, which soon turned the investigation toward Fleetwood, whose DNA had been uploaded into a national forensics database after he served prison time for strangling another pregnant woman, Linda Miller, in 1987.
Fleetwood denied any wrongdoing while in police custody, but the suspect stumbled after making statements that placed him on the block where the victim lived.
At the time of Porter’s murder, Fleetwood had been out of prison less than two years after pleading guilty to manslaughter and serving seven years — the minimum — upstate at Cape Vincent Correctional. He was released in August 1994, Department of Correction records show.
He was arrested for Porter’s death on Aug. 8, 2022.
Klein would later describe the investigation as the “pinnacle of my career” in an interview with the Daily News.
Fleetwood was also accused of three other violent Bronx assaults — one in 1984, in which a woman claimed he raped and choked her, though her family pressured her not to testify in court — and another identical attack in March 1996, but the woman died before she could press charges, police sources said.
In 2002, his DNA was tied to a Bronx rape but the victim couldn’t identify him in a lineup, telling police she was high on drugs during the attack.
“I believe firmly that you get by, but you don’t get away,” Derek Porter said of Fleetwood’s arrest. “You have to answer for your deeds. This person was going to get his anyway.”
