Katie Suarez, the jogger who was stabbed during a run along the Brooklyn waterfront, has died, her heartbroken family said Tuesday.
After clinging to life for three days at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn following the vicious Friday night attack, Suarez, 28, finally succumbed to her injuries Monday, her family said. She had been on a respirator.
Suarez was trying to meet up with her parents for her regular after-work run when she was attacked.
“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, Yasira Suarez, speaking out for the first time, said in Spanish Tuesday.
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. But as of Monday, they had no witnesses and no useful video evidence and had not identified a suspect or motive.
“I want to tell them to turn themselves in. please, just turn yourself in,” Suarez’s mother said. “He did this once, don’t let it happen again.”
NYPD officials praised the victim.
“This is a person who is very family-oriented, very work-oriented, was a productive, beautiful member of society,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said of the victim Monday. “Unfortunately, this horrific event happened to her. Right now, it seems that it’s random. Nobody else would have known that she was running there at that particular time.”
Suarez, 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, like normal.
Her father was running late and she took off running before he arrived.
When her dad arrived, he called Suarez to find out where she was exactly.
Suarez said she’d be back in a few minutes to join up with them for a ride back to their home in nearby Gravesend. When she didn’t show up, her father became concerned and called her again, the sources said.
When he got no answer, Suarez’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, ‘She’s here.’”
Suarez graduated from Sunset Park High School in 2016 and 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.