In 2015, she told the News she feared dying on the streets of NYC. In 2025, cops found her body

A homeless woman strangled to death, allegedly by a man with a history of preying on homeless women and sex workers, told the Daily News in an interview ten years ago  that— despite making efforts to get off the streets— she feared they would one day claim her life.

This year, on the afternoon of July 1, police found her lifeless body under an overpass to the Harlem River Drive at E. 135th St. and Park Ave. in east Harlem. Cops would charge Audoine Amazan, himself homeless and living in a shelter, two months later with strangling her to death.

Shivonne Thompson, who was born in the Bronx, gave an interview to the News in 2015, speaking with candor about her struggles with mental illness and homelessness. Echoing a story that is far too common in New York, she told the News she became homeless when she fell behind on her rent and “couldn’t pay.”

Her big fear, she said, was dying in the streets.

“I am frightened to be out here in the winter. I am afraid I’m gonna die on the street,” Thompson told a Daily News reporter in 2015.

Then 44 years old, Thompson said she suffered from schizophrenia and had been homeless three times since being on her own at age 20. At the time, she had been on the streets for more than five years, her longest consecutive period of homelessness.

“My mom is in Brooklyn and I like to go see her. She can’t take care of me because she’s still taking care of my other brothers and sisters,” Thompson said at the time. “She tells me not to cry, that everything is going to be alright for me, and to just keep going.”

“I am doing everything right, but I can’t get off the streets,” she explained.

Thompson said she lived off the $820 a month she received from the Social Security Administration for her disability, but it wasn’t enough to get a place of her own. She said she was “number something thousand” on a waiting list to get a NYCHA apartment.

Thompson said she spent most of her days at the library, applying for jobs and checking her email, to no avail. She also took medication daily for her schizophrenia.

“All this is pretty hard because I have no husband, no kids, there’s nobody to help,” she explained. “It’s just me.”

Strangers, she said, were often her only source of support.

“New Yorkers help keep me going. It is nice to get some kindness from people. It lifts me up to know at least someone cares,” she said. “Families get worn out and the city takes too long, if strangers didn’t help me I would be all alone.”

It was not clear what Thompson had been up to over the past decade, but police said she was homeless when she was killed.

Thompson was last seen on surveillance footage with Amazan approaching the area under the Harlem overpass at about 11:56 p.m. on June 30, prosecutors said.

Officers responding to a call for an unresponsive person found her in the same area at about 1:00 p.m. the next day, dead, with trauma to her head, face, neck, torso and limbs, cops said. The city Medical Examiner found that several bones in Thompson’s neck had been broken and ruled her cause of death as neck compression.

Amazan, 38, was arrested and charged with murder on September 3 after investigators found his DNA on Thompson’s neck, vagina and perianal area, prosecutors said. The DNA evidence suggests Amazan may have had sex with Thompson sometime before her death.

Amazan, who lives in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, was later indicted Wednesday on charges of murder in the second degree and strangulation in the first degree.

At an appearance in Manhattan criminal court, Judge Cori Weston ordered Amazan placed in protective custody and on suicide watch on Rikers Island, at the request of his defense attorney, H. Mitchell Schuman. Amazan had been assaulted twice since being held without bail in early September, according to Schuman.

“The [prosectors] believe that they can prove that our client had sexual relations with the deceased, but they have no proof whatsoever that he caused her death,” Schuman told the Daily News after the hearing.

Amazan, who had immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti roughly a year ago, was arrested for patronizing a prostitute and public lewdness on Aug. 12, near where Thompson’s body was found weeks earlier, according to court records.

Amazan has a history of targeting “people whose life circumstances make it difficult for them to report his abuse,” Assistant District Attorney Danielle Turcotte said at his initial arraignment.

In November 2024, a homeless woman showed up at Harlem Hospital claiming that she was beaten and sexually assaulted. While she could not communicate the details, detectives tested her clothing for DNA, which has now been linked to Amazan, Turcotte said. Amazan’s DNA was also linked to a case in which a homeless woman was forcibly raped on the roof of a NYCHA building nearby Amazan’s shelter, the prosecutor said.

Criminal charges in both cases are still pending.

The Daily News attempted to locate members of Thompspn’s family, but was unable to find any.