This 30-Year-Old was Strangled and Possibly Sexually Assaulted While Jogging in NYC
At 5 p.m. Tuesday, 30-year-old Karina Vetrano left her home in the Queens section of New York City for her daily run. She texted with friends. A security camera saw her running along a path not far from her home around 5:45 p.m. But Vetrano suddenly stopped responding to texts and after she was gone longer than usual, her father called her phone. No one answered.
When Vetrano didn't return home by 7 p.m., her father, Philip Vetrano, a retired New York City firefighter, got in touch with a police chief who lives nearby. The police chief called 911, starting a search for the young woman. Her father was part of the search party.
Around 10:40 p.m., the search party discovered Vetrano's cell phone by a bike path in Spring Creek Park, a recreation area adjacent to her Queens neighborhood. Her dad spotted her body in the tall grass about 15 feet away. She was face down in a secluded, marshy area that's part of a network of running paths frequented by joggers and cyclists. The section where Vetrano's body was found is often bypassed by people using the longer routes.
Her father, with whom she often ran, had urged her not to jog along that path without him. A bad back kept him home from this run.
"If you're a runner, you understand, you run every night," NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said. "So she went and she said she'd be all right."
Police said on Wednesday that Vetrano was strangled and her running clothes were in disarray, suggesting she was possibly sexually assaulted. According to the Daily News, her pants were not in the same position as when she left the house, police said.
No arrests have been made.
Police, who used cell phone signals to narrow the search, said there is security video of her running along the edge of the park at about 5:45 p.m. "There's a lot of forensic evidence as well as digital evidence in the area," NYPD's Boyce said.
Vetrano, who lived in the Howard Beach section of Queens, had just graduated from a Master's program at St. John's University in New York, according to DNAinfo. She was studying speech pathology. Vetrano was also working part-time as a waitress, a friend said.
"She was a very witty girl, she always had a smile on her face," 31-year-old Albert Aldo Puentes, a family friend, told DNAinfo. "She was very profound in the way she'd speak - people would pay attention."