Phil Vetrano knows the devastation facing the father of the jogger stabbed on a Brooklyn waterfront path Friday. Ten years ago, Vetrano discovered the lifeless body of his daughter, Karina, on a Queens running trail. Now he has one urgent message for Katie Suarez’s grieving dad: Help bring her attacker to justice.
“Do not stop — make it your life mission” to find justice, Vetrano told The Post on Sunday.
“It’s crazy, it sounds familiar — son of a bitch,” said Vetrano, 70, referring to the attacker who stabbed 28-year-old bank teller Suarez in the neck as she jogged along the popular promenade. The injuries left her brain-dead.
Vetrano said he was stunned by the haunting similarities between Suarez’s case and the tragedy that shattered his own family.
Like Suarez’s father, Vetrano went searching for his daughter after becoming worried that she had not returned from a run on Aug. 2, 2016.
“I was looking for her immediately,” recalled Vetrano, a retired FDNY firefighter. He normally ran with Karina, a vivacious world traveler who embraced life, but she had decided to go alone that day while he stayed home because of back pain.
“I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’” Vetrano said. “And she said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, I’ll be OK.’”
Those were the last words the 30-year-old would ever speak to her father.
After just over half an hour, Vetrano said he began to have a “bad feeling.” He called Karina repeatedly, but she did not answer.
The father of Friday’s victim also tried calling his daughter after she failed to arrive at their planned meeting place. When she did not pick up, he went out to look for her.
The two fathers ultimately found their daughters.
Karina had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Her random attacker was eventually captured.
Investigators believe Suarez was also attacked by a stranger, although a motive remains unknown. Preliminary findings indicate that she was neither robbed nor sexually assaulted, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Sunday.
Vetrano said the public anger sparked by Friday’s attack could help investigators find Suarez’s killer.
“It has to go viral like Karina went viral,” he said.
Vetrano said he put his entire life on hold while pursuing Karina’s killer.
“I had a multimillion-dollar business, and I just immediately stopped. I didn’t give a s–t anymore — my mission was to find this guy,” said Vetrano, who remembered covering the community with reward posters day after day.
“I wouldn’t stop.”
He urged Suarez’s father to keep the case in the public eye.
“You gotta get public outcry. You have to get people standing up, not forgetting about it, because once it gets swept under the rug, it’s just another little girl that gets killed.”
Vetrano also offered to speak with Suarez’s father and provide the support that only another grieving parent can offer.
“People say, ‘Yeah, I understand.’ No, you don’t understand. Only I understand, and he understands. And if he needs somebody to talk to, to help him get through his life, I am willing to speak to him,” Vetrano said.
“In one instant, you don’t believe what you’re seeing — you think, ‘This is not real.’”
Vetrano said he draws some comfort from knowing that Karina made the most of her 30 years.
“Karina lived her life as if she was dying,” said Vetrano, whose daughter graduated from St. John’s University with a master’s degree in speech pathology. She worked as a tutor and speech pathologist while pursuing ambitions as a writer and actress.
“She did everything she possibly wanted to do.”
