Phil Vetrano, who found his daughter Karina’s body on a Queens running path 10 years ago, is urging the father of a Brooklyn jogger stabbed in the neck Friday to make catching her attacker “his life mission.”
“Do not stop it — make it your life mission” to get justice, Vetrano told The Post on Sunday.
Vetrano, 70, was reacting to the attack on 28-year-old bank teller Katie Suarez, who was left brain-dead after being stabbed in the neck while jogging on a popular Brooklyn waterfront promenade Friday evening.
“It’s crazy, it sounds familiar — son of a bitch,” Vetrano said, describing the attacker.
The parallels between the two cases struck him immediately. Like Suarez’s father, Vetrano, a retired FDNY firefighter, went looking for his own daughter when she didn’t come home from a run on Aug. 2, 2016. Karina, 30, had planned to run alone that day in Spring Creek Park despite back pain.
“I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,'” Vetrano recalled saying before she left. “And she said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be OK.'”
Those were the last words she said to him. After about half an hour, Vetrano said he had a “bad feeling” and tried calling her repeatedly with no answer. Suarez’s father also tried reaching his daughter after she failed to show up at an agreed meeting spot, then went searching and found her himself — just as Vetrano had found Karina.
Karina had been sexually abused and strangled to death; her attacker was eventually caught. Suarez’s attacker is believed to be a stranger as well, though investigators have no motive. Law-enforcement sources told The Post on Sunday that preliminary findings show she was not robbed or sexually assaulted.
A Call for Public Pressure
Vetrano believes public outrage can drive the hunt for Suarez’s attacker the same way it did in his daughter’s case.
“It has to go viral like Karina went viral,” he said.
He described abandoning his own livelihood to chase down Karina’s killer. “I had a multimillion-dollar business, and I just immediately stopped. I didn’t give a s–t anymore — my mission was to find this guy,” Vetrano said, recalling how he papered the community with reward posters every day.
His message to Suarez’s father was blunt: “You gotta get public outcry. You have to get people standing up, not forgetting about it, because once it gets swept under the rug, it’s just another little girl that gets killed.”
Vetrano also offered to talk directly with Suarez’s father.
“People say, ‘Yeah, I understand.’ No, you don’t understand. Only I understand, and he understands. And if he needs somebody to talk to, to help him get through his life, I am willing to speak to him,” Vetrano said.
“In one instant, you don’t believe what you’re seeing — you think, ‘This is not real,'” he added.
Vetrano said he finds some comfort in how fully Karina, a St. John’s University graduate with a master’s degree in speech pathology who worked as a tutor and aspired to write and act, lived before her death. “Karina lived her life as if she was dying,” he said. “She did everything she possibly wanted to do.”
