Brooklyn Runner Katie Suarez Dies After Being Stabbed on a Waterfront Path

Katie Suarez, the 28-year-old who was stabbed in the neck while running on the Shore Parkway Greenway in Bath Beach, Brooklyn, on the evening of Oct. 30, died on Monday night, her mother, Yasira Suarez, told NBC New York. She had been on life support at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn since the attack, and her family took her off it on Monday, CBS New York reported, with police now describing the attack as a fatal stabbing.

Marathon Handbook reported on the attack as the NYPD released her photo and asked for anyone who had seen her on the path. More than a week later, there have been no arrests, and police have not made public any details about a suspect.

With no cameras on the path, detectives have turned their attention to the Belt Parkway that runs right alongside it. A license plate reader recorded about 1,700 cars passing between 7:56 and 8:12 p.m., the window in which police believe she was attacked, and investigators are working through them in the hope that a driver had a dashcam running. “We’re tracking all those cars down to see if anybody had dash cams or anything that might help us in that area there,” Joseph Kenny, the NYPD’s chief of detectives, said, according to CBS New York. NBC reported that the department has set up a task force.

That stretch of the greenway has no streetlights and no surveillance cameras, because electricity does not reach it, according to The New York Times, which leaves detectives few clues from the path itself. She was attacked next to a construction site for a new pedestrian bridge, and the covered fencing around it screened that spot from passing traffic, the paper reported.

Suarez lived and worked nearby, and her Strava profile showed at least four runs along that route in the two weeks before the attack, according to the Times. On the Friday, Kenny said, she left her job at the TD Bank in the Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center at about 6:30 p.m. and met her mother at a Wendy’s nearby, where her father joined them. She changed into her running clothes there and went out on the greenway. About an hour later her father phoned her, and she told him she was only half a mile away. When 10 minutes passed with no sign of her, he went down the path to look, and at about 8:15 p.m. he found her under a tree beside the path.

Her mother has spoken publicly to ask for help. “I am asking for justice, I am asking for justice for Katie Suarez,” she told WABC. She also appealed to witnesses in Spanish; in CBS New York’s translation, she said: “Please, if someone saw something, speak up. She did not deserve this.”

Neighbors held a prayer vigil in Bath Beach on Wednesday evening, close to the bank where Suarez worked as a teller. Its organizer, the Rev. Erick Salgado, wants the Crime Stoppers reward raised from $10,000 to $50,000, and local officials are pushing for lights. Councilmember Susan Zhuang wrote to Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Wednesday asking for mobile light towers along the path, more patrols and more cameras, CBS reported, after State Sen. Steve Chan had already called for more lights there. The mayor’s office said in a statement that “these attacks on women across our city are horrific.”

Police sources had told the New York Post she was training for the New York City Marathon, though the Times reported she was not registered for the Nov. 1 race.

NBC New York compared the case with the killing of Karina Vetrano while she ran in Spring Creek Park in Queens in August 2016; a man was arrested six months later and convicted of her murder in 2019. Her father, Phil Vetrano, has offered to help the Suarez family, and told NBC New York what investigators need now: “You need people, people that saw something, people that heard something.”

Police are asking anyone with information, or with video from the area between 7 and 9 p.m. on Oct. 30, to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or 1-888-57-PISTA (74782) in Spanish, or to submit a tip at crimestoppers.nypdonline.org.