Police have arrested a 27-year-old former NYPD cop and city substitute school aide for the murder of Brooklyn jogger Katie Suarez, who was stabbed to death during a run along the Brooklyn waterfront, multiple police sources said Saturday.
Sayed Mohassib, who is currently employed by the city’s Department of Education, has been charged with second-degree murder, department officials confirm.
Meanwhile, investigators were searching a garbage dump in New Jersey, hoping to find the murder weapon, which they believe the killer tossed in the trash, the sources said.
Mohassib was placed at the scene of the killing. When questioned, he said he didn’t remember the attack and only remembers waking up and being covered by blood.
He was briefly with the NYPD before he was discharged for psychological reasons, police sources with knowledge of the case said.
He attended Brooklyn College at the same time that Suarez did, but it was not clear if the two knew each other, the sources said.
After clinging to life for three days at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn following the vicious Oct. 30 attack, Suarez, 28, finally succumbed to her injuries Monday, her family said. She had been on a respirator.
“I’m just left with this pain, and, oh my God, remembering my daughter as she was,” the victim’s mother, Yasira Suarez, said in Spanish. “She just wanted to run.”
The NYPD had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Suarez’s killer.
The victim was running eastbound on the Shore Parkway Greenway promenade off of the Belt Parkway near Canton Ave. in Bath Beach when her killer pounced, stabbing her multiple times in the neck about 8:15 p.m., cops said.
Police have been pulling out all the stops in their hunt for clues that could lead them to the attacker, scouring the entire area with K9 and aviation units, drones and scuba divers, officials said.
Katie was a dedicated runner who competed in the Frozen Bonsai 5K held on March 27 in Prospect Park and other races. She was trying to meet up with her parents for their regular after-work run when she was attacked. Her father is an MTA bus driver, officials said.
“We are a very close-knit family — a family where mom and dad were always there for her and for my children,” the victim’s mother said. “I don’t know if you are mothers, but for something like this to happen overnight … she didn’t deserve it.”
“Please, just turn yourself in,” Katie’s mother said of the killer. “You did this once, don’t let it happen again, don’t let it be repeated … Because what you did to this person, you took away a little angel.”
Katie, who worked at the TD Bank on Shore Parkway in Bath Beach, typically met up with her parents at the Wendy’s next to her job after getting off work. On Friday, she changed into running clothes and passed her work uniform to her mom, as usual.
Her father, who drives a route in Brooklyn, was running late, and she took off running before he arrived.
When her dad arrived, he called Katie to find out where she was exactly.
Katie said she’d be back in a few minutes to join up with them for a ride back to their home. When she didn’t show up, her father became concerned and called her again, the sources said.
When he got no answer, Katie’s mother and father split up to look for her.
Her father found her less than a mile away under a tree, bleeding from two stab wounds to the neck.
The frantic father stopped a passing cyclist and asked him to call 911.
“It’s even harder for him, because he was the one who found her,” the victim’s mother said of her husband. “He was the one who called me and said that she was here — and that she was no longer responding.”
Katie was from El Salvador and graduated from Sunset Park High School in 2016. She earned an associate’s degree from Kingsborough Community College in 2018 and a bachelor’s in television and radio from Brooklyn College in 2020, according to her LinkedIn profile. She started working as a teller for TD Bank in 2021.