A man was arrested and charged with second-degree murder on Saturday in the fatal stabbing of a Brooklyn jogger, ending an expansive weeklong search for her attacker, the police said.
The man, Sayed Mohassib, 27, a public school paraprofessional from Brooklyn who had worked briefly for the Police Department, was charged with murder, tampering with physical evidence and criminal possession of a weapon in the attack on Katie Suarez, 28, the police said. Ms. Suarez was stabbed in the neck on Oct. 30 while running along a dark stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront.
Ms. Suarez was attacked an hour after sunset on a relatively remote stretch known as the Shore Parkway Greenway, where there are no surveillance cameras and no streetlights, which complicated the search for a suspect.
Following the attack, Ms. Suarez had been on a ventilator for days before her death. On Friday, the New York City medical examiner’s office ruled her death a homicide, according to a spokeswoman for the agency.
Mr. Mohassib worked as a substitute paraprofessional for the city’s Department of Education until his arrest, according to city payroll records. Nicole Brownstein, a spokeswoman for the agency, said on Saturday that Mr. Mohassib had been suspended, adding that it would “move to terminate employment pending the outcome of the criminal case.” It was unclear on Saturday whether Mr. Mohassib knew Ms. Suarez. But she attended Brooklyn College during the 2018-19 academic year, according to her LinkedIn, when Mr. Mohassib was a freshman there majoring in physical education and playing on the school’s basketball team, school athletic records show.
Mr. Mohassib enrolled in the Police Academy in April 2022, the police said. After he graduated in October 2022, Mr. Mohassib worked as an officer for roughly a month before applying for military leave. He resigned from the Police Department that December.
Mr. Mohassib sought to rejoin the department on Jan. 11, 2023, the police said. But, when he met with several supervisors that day, they were concerned about his behavior and disheveled appearance, and he was taken to Bellevue Hospital. The department never rehired him.
The following year, on Sept. 27, 2024, Mr. Mohassib’s mother and sister called 911 to report that he had threatened to “chop them up,” according to two law enforcement officials with knowledge of the investigation who were unauthorized to speak publicly about the matter.
Officers found Mr. Mohassib later that day at Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center, a waterfront retail complex near his home in South Brooklyn, and was taken to Coney Island Hospital, the officials said. (Ms. Suarez had worked at a TD Bank branch at the shopping center, and she had set out from there for her run on Oct. 30, the day she was stabbed.)
The Department of Education declined to answer questions about what school Mr. Mohassib worked at, whether officials had received complaints about him or if the agency was aware of his mental health history, citing the ongoing investigation.
Three lawmakers representing parts of South Brooklyn said in a joint statement on Saturday that Mr. Mohassib’s employment at a public school at the time of the attack “raises serious questions” about the Education Department’s vetting process. The revelation “warrants a full investigation” into his hiring and the circumstances of his employment, they said.
On Saturday, a police officer stationed outside Mr. Mohassib’s apartment building on the border of Bensonhurst and Bath Beach said detectives had obtained a search warrant and had come to the house early that morning.
A neighbor, Roza Rejepnazarova, 65, said she had been “in shock” when she first saw police officers at the home Mr. Mohassib shares with his sister and mother on Friday afternoon. Ms. Rejepnazarova said she had lived next to Mr. Mohassib and his family for years and knew them to be “very good people.”
“I never heard them fight,” she said in Russian. “The son was so good. He always said, ‘Hi,’ and opened the door.” Once, she added, Mr. Mohassib had brought her a watermelon as a gift.
A little after 11:30 a.m., Mr. Mohassib’s mother and sister arrived at the apartment building, his mother weeping.
Just two miles away in Gravesend, where Ms. Suarez lived with her family, their next-door neighbor, Bridget Rijos, 58, began to cry when she heard that the man who was accused of being the young woman’s attacker had been arrested.
“I am so relieved,” she said, adding that Ms. Suarez’s death had “hit this whole block, even the people that didn’t know her.”
Ms. Rijos said the Suarez family had been a warm presence during the few years they had lived in the area, inviting her to birthday parties and hosting neighborhood barbecues.
“Nobody had anything to say bad about her and not about that family,” Ms Rijos said.
The post Brooklyn Jogger Dies and a Man Is Charged With Murder in Her Stabbing appeared first on New York Times.
