Man Charged With Murder in Killing of Brooklyn Runner Katie Suarez

Katie Suarez was stabbed in the neck during an evening run on the Shore Parkway Greenway in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, on Oct. 30, and died three days later at 28. Marathon Handbook reported on the attack as police appealed for witnesses, and again after her death, when detectives still had no suspect and were working through some 1,700 cars that had passed on the Belt Parkway. A little over a week after she was attacked, the NYPD made an arrest.

Police arrested Sayed Mohassib, 27, who lives in Bath Beach, on Saturday. He is charged with second-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon, and he pleaded not guilty at his arraignment that night, CBS New York reported. A judge denied him bail. ABC News reported that no information about his lawyer was available.

“There’s no residences there. There’s no businesses there, so there’s a complete lack of video,” Joseph Kenny, the NYPD’s chief of detectives, said on Nov. 2, three days after the attack, NY1 reported. Police have given few details of how they eventually identified Mohassib. According to law enforcement sources who spoke to NBC New York, a camera covering the area near the path showed a man pacing the stretch, and detectives identified him at a barbershop the footage led them to.

Mohassib worked as a teacher’s aide at P.S. 200, an elementary school a short walk from the part of the greenway where Suarez was stabbed, and police sources told CBS New York he had kept going to work there in the days after the attack. His road to that job, which Spectrum News NY1 has looked into, ran through the NYPD and the Marines. He joined the police department in 2022 and was still in field training in the Bronx when he left on extended military leave, according to NY1 and CBS. His time in the Marines lasted under a month, and in a statement to CBS, the Corps said: “His service was incongruent with Marine Corps’ expectations and standards.” An attempt to get back on the force afterward was unsuccessful, NY1 reported.

Cameras recorded him on his way to the path and again as he fled, according to the criminal complaint as described by CBS. Shortly after he got back to his building, the complaint says, he reappeared wearing only underwear and threw his clothes down the trash chute, and inside his apartment a detective watched him clean a reddish stain from a wall. NY1 reported that Mohassib told investigators he had gone to the path with a knife because “people were going to come and kill his family,” and that, according to prosecutors, he also told them he got rid of the knife. He maintained he had not stabbed anyone. In his telling, he “sat down on a bench and became covered in blood,” CBS reported.

The Department of Education has suspended him and said it “will move to terminate employment pending the outcome of the conviction.” City Councilmember Kayla Santosuosso, state Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assemblymember-elect Chris McCreight, who want to know how he got the job in the first place, said in a joint statement that the case “raises serious questions about how he came to be employed in a local public school.”

NBC New York has compared Suarez’s case with the killing of Karina Vetrano, who was attacked while running in Spring Creek Park in Queens in August 2016. No arrest came in that case for six months. Earlier in the week, Suarez’s mother, Yasira Suarez, had pleaded for whoever attacked her daughter to turn themselves in, saying “you took an angel,” according to CBS. The Rev. Erick Salgado, who organized a vigil for Suarez in Bath Beach, told CBS after the arrest: “We want to make sure that he’s held accountable.”

Mohassib, who has pleaded not guilty, is due back in court on Tuesday.