A 5-year-old boy was at the window of his Bronx apartment, screaming frantically for help. He and his 2-year-old sister had been alone in the apartment for hours after finding their mother lifeless on the bedroom floor.

A passer-by answered the boy’s panicked cries and called 911, according to a law enforcement official. When officers arrived, the police said, they discovered that the mother, Luz Perez, was dead and that she had injuries to her head and body.

On Tuesday, more than two months after the Oct. 13 incident, the police arrested a man with a previous manslaughter conviction who was free on parole, accusing him of strangling Ms. Perez.

The man, Asun Thomas, 46, was charged with murder, the police said. He was ordered held without bail and sent to the Vernon C. Bain Center, the floating jail in the Bronx, court and city correction department records show.

He is scheduled to be arraigned on Dec. 30, records show. He was being represented by the Legal Aid Society, according to court records, but a Legal Aid spokesman said that the organization had no information about an active case involving Mr. Thomas.

The authorities had long said that they viewed Ms. Perez’s death as suspicious, and on Monday they announced that New York City’s medical examiner had ruled it a homicide caused by strangulation.

Investigators believe that Ms. Perez’s children spent more than a day in the apartment fending for themselves after she was killed, a police detective told WNBC-TV and WPIX-TV. The boy eventually unlatched the window and called for help, the detective said.

When officials began investigating Ms. Perez’s death, they thought she might have been stabbed with a screwdriver. But no stab wounds were found, the police later said, leaving investigators unsure about how she had died.

Ms. Perez’s children were found unharmed, officials said. They were taken to a hospital for evaluation and later released to Ms. Perez’s relatives.

Mr. Thomas came to investigators’ attention after they saw him on surveillance video captured near Ms. Perez’s home in the Belmont neighborhood, the police said. They released an image from the video on Monday.

Mr. Thomas, accompanied by a lawyer, turned himself in the next day, a second official familiar with the case said.

Detectives believe that Mr. Thomas and Ms. Perez knew each other before her death, although the exact nature of the relationship was unclear, the second official said.

Mr. Thomas was previously convicted of manslaughter in the Bronx, public records show. Details of the case were not immediately available.

Mr. Thomas was sentenced to 20 years in prison as a result of the conviction, according to state corrections records. He entered prison in 2000 and was released on parole in August 2016.

When he turned himself in, Mr. Thomas told the police he was living at the Peter Jay Sharp Center for Opportunity, a 400-bed transitional housing facility in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

The center is operated by the Doe Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides housing and social services to homeless and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers.

A spokesman for the Doe Fund said that the organization was not immediately able to provide information about Mr. Thomas’s connection to its programs.

Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting.

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