Phil Vetrano, who found his daughter Karina’s body on a Queens running path a decade ago, is reaching out to the father of a Brooklyn jogger who was stabbed and left brain-dead on Friday, urging him not to let public attention on the case fade.
“Do not stop it — make it your life mission” to get justice, Vetrano, 70, told The Post on Sunday.
The victim, 28-year-old bank teller Katie Suarez, was stabbed in the neck Friday evening while jogging along a popular waterfront promenade in Brooklyn. Her attacker is believed to have been a stranger, and investigators have not identified a motive. Law-enforcement sources told The Post on Sunday that preliminary findings show she was not robbed or sexually assaulted.
Vetrano, a retired FDNY firefighter, said he was struck by how closely the circumstances echo what happened to his own family in 2016.
“It’s crazy, it sounds familiar — son of a bitch,” he said of whoever attacked Suarez.
On Aug. 2, 2016, Vetrano grew worried when his daughter Karina, then 30, didn’t return from a run in Spring Creek Park and went looking for her himself. He had urged her not to go alone that day because of her back pain.
“I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ And she said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be OK.'”
Those were the last words Karina said to her father. After about half an hour of unanswered calls, Vetrano said he had a “bad feeling” and went to find her. He did — she had been sexually abused and strangled by an attacker who was later caught.
Suarez’s father also went searching for his daughter Friday after she failed to show up at a planned meeting spot and didn’t answer her phone. Like Vetrano, he was the one who found her.
Vetrano said sustained public pressure helped drive the investigation into Karina’s murder, and he believes the same could help find Suarez’s attacker.
“It has to go viral like Karina went viral,” he said.
He recalled abandoning his business entirely after his daughter’s death to focus on finding her killer, papering the community with reward posters.
“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,” he said.
His message to Suarez’s father was direct: “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 with Suarez’s father directly, saying only someone who has lived through a similar loss can truly understand it.
“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 he finds some comfort remembering how fully his daughter, 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.”
