NYPD arrests NYC substitute school aide in murder of Brooklyn jogger Katie Suarez
A 27-year-old former NYPD cop who currently works with children as a city substitute school aide has been arrested for the murder of Brooklyn jogger Katie Suarez, who was stabbed to death during a run along the Brooklyn waterfront, police said Saturday.
Sayed Mohassib, who is currently employed by the city's Department of Education, has been charged with second-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and weapons possession for fatally stabbing Suarez, 28, in the neck during a Friday night jog a week ago, department officials confirmed.
Meanwhile, NYPD investigators were searching a garbage dump in New Jersey, hoping to find the murder weapon, which they believe Mohassib tossed in the trash, police sources said.
Suarez, a Brooklyn bank teller, 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.
She was running eastbound on the Shore Parkway Greenway promenade off of the Belt Parkway near Canton Ave. in Bath Beach when Mohassib allegedly pounced, stabbing her multiple times in the neck about 8:15 p.m. on Oct. 30, cops said.
After clinging to life for three days at NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn , Suarez finally succumbed to her injuries on Monday, her grieving family said earlier this week. 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."
After killing Suarez, Mohassib returned to work at P.S. 200 in Bath Beach on Monday, where he was assigned to a classroom working with children, according to a police source with knowledge of the case.
The school is just a few short blocks from where he allegedly stabbed his victim and down the block from the 62nd Precinct stationhouse, where detectives charged him with murder.
Mohassib was placed at the scene of the killing. When he was taken into custody Friday and questioned, he said he didn't remember the attack but remembered waking up and being covered in blood with a knife at his side.
His arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court was pending Saturday.
"Oh my God, I'm gonna cry," Bridget Rijos, a longtime neighbor of Suarez in Coney Island, said, choking up as she learned of Mohassib's arrest. Suarez's family wasn't home Saturday. "I was hoping it wasn't gonna be a cold case."
In October 2022, Mohassib graduated from the NYPD police academy and walked the beat in the Bronx for one month before he resigned to join the Marines, police sources said. A month later, he was discharged from the military for psychological reasons, police sources said.
On Dec. 16 of that year, he tried to reapply to the NYPD. When the department interviewed him a month later, NYPD officials noted he looked disheveled and was acting erratically. Instead of signing him up, supervisors denied his application and called an ambulance, which took him to Bellevue Hospital for an evaluation, the sources said.
Unable to rejoin the NYPD, he became an aide for the Department of Education, officials said.
Mohassib attended Brooklyn College, where he played basketball, at the same time Suarez did, but it was not clear if the two knew each other, police sources said.
He lived in Bensonhurst, where he attended a local mosque, a neighbor said.
"He lives with his mom. A nice guy," said the 54-year-old neighbor, who declined to share his name. "He talk to me regularly."
Mohassib hadn't been seen in the building in the last week, the neighbor said. The family is originally from Egypt and the suspect had a cousin who was a policeman who died a few years ago. It was not immediately clear where the cousin worked.
The neighbor did notice that Mohassib's behavior had changed over the last few years.
"He's different. He changed. After three years, he's a different guy," the neighbor said. "Sometimes he got nervous, but I don't know what happened."
"He have some problems, but I don't know what happened," he said.
Department of Education officials said they will be "supporting the NYPD in their investigation" of Mohassib.
"The safety of our students is our very top priority," a DOE spokeswoman said. "We have suspended this individual and will move to terminate employment pending the outcome of the conviction."
The spokeswoman wouldn't say how Mohassib was hired despite indications that he was unstable. Nor would the DOE say if his assignment gave him direct access to children or if he was in the classroom in the last week.
Rijos, 58, was stunned to learn that Suarez's killer was a DOE employee.
"I'm thinking it's a homeless person just because of the way it happened to her. You know, in the dark and somebody just ran up on her," she said. "I'm happy that they found somebody. … a little peace for that family, something, you know?"
News of Suarez's murder hit the "whole block really bad," she said.
"Even the people that didn't know her were affected by what happened because that is just horrific," she said. "(She was a) good girl. Nobody had anything bad to say about her and not about that family."
The NYPD had offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Suarez's killer.
Katie typically met up with her parents at the Wendy's next to her job after getting off work. The day she was stabbed, 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.
