Even The Police Couldn’t Hold Back Tears…This Case Changed Everything | True Crime Documentary 

It was a beautiful goal. Young Andre Lowe. You know Andre Lowe. Shh. But it’s it’s sad. I’m going to address the coward. You know that my daughter was a force to be reckoned with. And I guarantee you that you will be reckoning with that force. Not only for the rest of your pathetic life, but for the rest of eternity as you burn in hell.

 My daughter was a big believer of karma. And as you could see, she’s magical. The whole world >> [music] >> At 4:52 p.m. on August 2nd, 2016, a young woman in the East New York, Brooklyn took a photo of herself in her kitchen. Her mother walked past in the background not even looking at the camera. It’s an unremarkable photo, the kind taken a thousand times a day in a thousand kitchens.

At 5:00 p.m. she laced up her running shoes. Her father, a retired firefighter, sat in a chair nearby nursing a bad back. He told her he didn’t like her running alone that day, not in that park, not with the weeds as tall as they were. She told him not to worry. By 5:45 sitting in that same chair, he felt something shift.

 He couldn’t explain it. She wasn’t due back for a while yet, and there was no reason to think anything was wrong, but something in him already knew. 2 hours later, the photo on her phone would be the last picture anyone ever took of her alive. Before we go further, I’m Victor, and this is the story of what happened in that Brooklyn park that evening.

If you’re new here, consider sticking around. This channel covers cases like this one every week. And if you don’t mind, drop your city in the comments. I’m always curious where everyone’s watching from. Now, back to that afternoon. At 5:00 p.m., she stepped out the door of her family’s home in East New York and turned towards Spring Creek.

Her name was Karina Vetrano. She was 30 years old, and she still lived at home with her parents in Howard Beach, a quiet section of Queens edged by water and modest single-family houses. She’d earned a master’s degree from St. John’s University and worked as a speech pathologist in Manhattan, spending her days with children who had disabilities, teaching them to find words that didn’t come easily.

Standing barely 5 ft tall, she had a laugh that friends said filled up whatever room she was in. People who knew her described her as a firecracker, someone who moved through life at full volume in the best possible way. On the side, she picked up work as a club promoter in Astoria, bringing in guests and working the VIP crowd on weekends.

 She was, by every account, someone who was still building a career, a life, a future she’d earned the hard way and was just getting started living. Running was her outlet. Most days she ran with her father, a retired FDNY firefighter named Phil. But that afternoon, his back was bothering him, and he stayed home. So, at 5:00 p.m.

, Karina left the house alone and turned towards Spring Creek. By 6:45 p.m., Phil hadn’t heard from his daughter. He called her phone, no answer. He called again, still nothing. Two hours had now passed since she left the house, and the silence had gone from unusual to alarming. Phil reached out to a childhood friend who worked with the NYPD.

Within minutes, a patrol car was rolling towards Spring Creek, a nearly 2 square-mile stretch of federally protected marshland. Its trails swallowed on either side by weeds that grew as high as 10 ft. Officers searched, but couldn’t find her. So, the search grew. Units from the 106 Precinct arrived and began pushing through the overgrowth, calling her name into a landscape that swallowed sound whole.

Phil handed over her phone’s location data to help narrow the search. As evening fell into darkness, more officers arrived, then more. NYPD Detective Barry Brown was there. He said you could feel the concern building as they moved down the path. That at one point, someone said out loud what everyone was already thinking, “This doesn’t feel good.

” At 10:30 p.m., officers heard a man screaming. They ran toward the sound. It was Phil. He’d found her face down in a marshy clearing, roughly 15 ft off the main trail, an area residents had complained about for years, tall weeds nobody had ever cleared. Officers had to physically pull him away. He wouldn’t let her go.

He kept saying he had to take her home. What detectives found at the scene made clear this hadn’t been an accident. Karina had bruising to her face, broken teeth, abrasions on her legs. There were signs her clothing had been disturbed. An investigator said the evidence pointed to a sexual assault. She had fought, fought so hard that her own teeth had broken in the struggle.

One of her hands was found gripping grass, as though she’d been dragged. The city’s chief of detectives would later say it plainly, she had put up a ferocious fight right until the end. An autopsy confirmed what the scene already suggested. Karina had been strangled, and the marks left behind showed the force of what had happened.

Phil would say later that he believed she’d led him to her, that she needed her father to be the one who found her. But whoever had done this was already gone. And in the marshland just outside a residential Brooklyn neighborhood with a body, a fight for survival written into the evidence, and no witnesses, investigators were left with one question, who was he, and how had he simply disappeared? >> It’s one of the most intense and difficult crime scene searches in recent years. The view from Chopper 2 shows the

demanding scope of the task. >> a very active crime scene in a very remote area. So, we’re we’re searching this as best we can in a very tough condition. Uh the grass is very high. We’re using machetes to search for additional evidence wherever we go. >> Thursday, dozens of detectives fanned across Howard Beach interviewing landscapers and home improvement workers.

>> They’re just asking us what time we shut up and were you working Tuesday? They want this guy. Whoever he is, I don’t know. I hope they got him. >> Tonight, teams of search crews continue to tackle the dense weeds 300 ft at a time. First, hacking away by hand with machetes. They don’t want to damage any possible clues as they clear the area.

>> We’re clearing a a very vast area in the back adjacent to the crime scene and we’re [clears throat] we’re conducting a search for evidence. >> The the mother and father are just visibly shaken. They want closure. They want justice. They want to be able to bury their daughter with dignity. >> We all jog and we all walk out here and enjoy, you know, the serenity and now I’m I’m afraid to go out.

>> At his latest briefing, the chief of detectives calling this case quote a severe community threat and taking the following steps. A 6-month review of all Parks Police activity in the area, collecting information from the police department’s sex offender monitoring unit and continuing with their cell phone tower investigation.

 But so far, just the possibility that the killer may not have been someone Karina Vetrano knew, well, it certainly leaves residents on edge. >> My concerns is that, you know, that that it’s if it’s somebody that lives in in the area that he might do it again. >> News of the murder spread fast through the neighborhood.

 Karina’s community, close-knit, mostly working families, many with ties to the FDNY and NYPD, was shaken. People who had lived beside Spring Creek their whole lives suddenly saw it differently. Investigators moved quickly to establish the basics. A rape kit was collected, but it failed to yield a usable DNA profile. Still, detectives got a break.

 DNA was recovered from underneath Karina’s fingernails and separately from her cell phone, which had been found several feet from where her body lay. It gave them a profile. What it didn’t give them yet was a name. That profile was run against the national CODIS database and came back with no match.

 Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce explained the limitation publicly. The DNA database itself had only existed since 1998, meaning anyone convicted before then or anyone who’d simply never been arrested wouldn’t be in it. “It could be someone older with a record predating the system,” he said. “Or it could be someone young who’d never been arrested at all.

” With no eyewitnesses and a database dead end, this was now functionally a search for a stranger. The scale of the response reflected that. Because Karina’s body had been found on federally owned land, the NYPD brought in the FBI, who supplied additional manpower and drones to search the reserve.

 A tractor with an industrial mower was brought in to clear sections of the 10-ft weeds by hand and by machine. Detectives investigated a homeless encampment more than a mile from the scene and ruled it out. They interviewed registered sex offenders living nearby. They questioned people known to sleep in the park. Eight NYPD squads across Queens South each contributed two detectives to a dedicated task force, and there was a broader question hanging over all of it.

How a nearly 2-sq mi stretch of park so close to residential streets could be so poorly monitored. A federal park official acknowledged as much publicly, admitting the area was only patrolled from its perimeter and only at irregular intervals across a 24-hour cycle. The same handful of officers covered both the Brooklyn and Queens sections of the entire Gateway National Recreation Area, of which Spring Creek was only one piece.

“It wasn’t a secret,” the district manager said. “It was something that had already been discussing with the community, just never fast enough.” Money began pouring in for information. Police put up $25,000. The mayor’s office added another $10,000. The rest came from a GoFundMe campaign that ordinary residents had built themselves, refusing to let the case go cold from lack of resources.

Then came a strange parallel. Detectives were contacted by Massachusetts State Police asking whether Karina’s murder might be connected to the death of 27-year-old Vanessa Marquez, a Google account manager who had gone out for a run near her mother’s home in Princeton and never returned. Her body was found in a wooded area roughly half a mile away 5 days after Karina’s murder.

For a while, two states quietly compared notes, wondering whether one man was responsible for both. But New York investigators maintained their working theory. Karina’s murder had been random and the two cases likely weren’t linked. Detectives tried to reconstruct the crime itself. Their working theory held that the attacker had fled through the surrounding brush and exited near the Belt Parkway.

They traced every possible road out of the park. They reviewed footage from every home bordering Spring Creek. Nothing turned up a face. It was, as more than one investigator put it, a search for a needle in a haystack. Then, a possible break. A Verizon technician who’d been working inside the park the day of the murder came forward, describing a man he’d found suspicious, wearing a wool cap, moving through the area around the time investigators believed the attack occurred.

Working from his description, police released a composite sketch to the public on August 31st. >> At a press conference, Chief Boyce says one particular thing stands out. >> And if you’ll notice the dark wool hat, remember the day was August 2nd. Well, unusually wearing a wool hat in the area there. >> And now a laser-sharp focus on this bike path where, unfortunately, there are no cameras.

 And finding this man who police say is black, 5’10”, between 35 and 45 years old, with a medium build. >> We have to speak to this person. That’s the only reason we’re putting it out. >> It led them to a man named Kevin. A former NYPD chief, now working security at a Brooklyn apartment building, called Chief Boyce directly. One of his tenants, he said, looked like the man in the sketch.

 Officers went to the building. Kevin wouldn’t answer the door at first. They waited him out. When he finally emerged, he acknowledged the resemblance and agreed to go to the precinct for questioning. Then he refused to provide a DNA sample. Detective Brown said that refusal immediately changed the tone of the room.

 Police obtained a discarded water bottle instead and ran the DNA against the crime scene profile. It didn’t match. Kevin was cleared. And the investigation once again had nowhere to go. And in an effort to jog the public’s memory, surveillance footage of Karina from earlier that same day, captured during what looked like a routine run, was released through Crime Watch Daily.

It was, investigators said, the last known footage of her alive. Her family walked her final route themselves, retracing her last known steps, hoping something would surface. Nothing did. With the DNA still unmatched, Phil pushed investigators toward a technique called familial DNA searching, a method that could identify relatives of an unknown suspect already in the system, even if the suspect himself wasn’t.

 It was already legal in nine states. New York wasn’t one of them. Phil started a petition to change that. >> Familial DNA searching goes deeper, using special software to look for a similar, not exact, match, indicating the suspect could be related to someone in the system. >> There’s untold amount of cold cases that will be solved by this.

>> But the ACLU is pushing back, saying that such policy could lead to, quote, miscarriages of justice. >> Well, I think they’re just ignorant, ignorant of the the facts that we are just targeting criminals. >> By early 2017, the case had gone cold in every conventional sense. A profile with no name, a sketch that led nowhere, a community still watching every jogger, every stranger, every man in a hooded sweatshirt who lingered too long near the park.

And then one detective went back and reread his own notes from months earlier and remembered something that at the time hadn’t seemed like anything at all. In January 2017, Lieutenant John Russo sat down with the case file again. Russo had been there the night Karina’s body was found, one of the officers on scene in the marsh.

He also happened to live in Howard Beach, the same neighborhood Karina had called home. Something kept pulling him back to a memory from May 2016, 3 months before the murder. He’d been standing on his own street when he noticed a man walking away from him, a house over. It was 80° outside and the man had on a long-sleeved tracksuit, hood pulled up over his head.

Russo remembered thinking simply, “That’s odd.” The man appeared to be studying the houses around him. Russo called it in. By the time officers arrived, the man was gone. The next day, neighbors reported a similar figure, a man in a black and white tracksuit cutting through people’s yards.

 Russo encountered him again, this time close enough to ask his name. The man told him Chanel Lewis. At the time, it seemed like nothing. Russo figured their paths wouldn’t cross again. But sitting with the case 8 months later, that memory started to itch at him. He pulled Chanel Lewis’s name and found no criminal record, but several summonses, all tied to the Brooklyn side of Spring Creek Park, directly across from where Karina had been killed.

 Russo called Chief Boyce. Boyce would say later there was something in Russo’s voice on that call, a feeling that this could be it. They brought Lewis in. He was cooperative. He described himself as a loner, someone who walked the trails around Spring Creek to clear his head and listen to music. He knew the park well.

And when detectives asked for a DNA sample, he agreed voluntarily. While the sample was processed, detectives went digging into his past. And what they found was a documented history stretching back to high school. According to news reports, in May 2011, when Lewis was 15, he had allegedly made violent threats toward female classmates and asked what would happen if he brought a weapon to school.

School officials called the police. He was taken in as an emotionally disturbed person, evaluated at a hospital, and released. The following month, he reportedly cursed at and threatened a female student and her family and was hospitalized again. One tabloid report claimed he’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, a claim that appears to trace back to a single New York Post article and was never independently confirmed elsewhere.

By September 2011, he’d been transferred to a private school for students with emotional and behavioral needs. Former classmates remembered him as withdrawn, frequently bullied. “Kids hit him,” some said, “girls included.” He rarely fought back. Others who knew him during that period said they’d never seen him be violent toward anyone.

The school’s executive director later confirmed Lewis graduated in 2015 with no disciplinary record and no reported threats during his time there. Then came a detail that investigators hadn’t expected, offered up by the one person trying to defend him. Chanel Lewis’s father, certain his son was innocent, told detectives that he personally had taken Chanel to the hospital the day after Karina’s murder for an injured hand.

 Lewis had claimed he’d gotten into an altercation. Detectives tracked down the treating physician. According to Detective Barry Brown, the doctor confirmed he’d removed a foreign object from Lewis’s hand that day. Less than a day after that, the voluntary DNA sample came back from the lab. It matched. The foreign object the doctor had pulled from his hand was now believed to be a fragment of Karina’s own tooth, broken off the moment she’d bitten down on the man strangling her, fighting for her life in a Brooklyn marsh 5 months earlier.

>> I’m Detective Deal. You’re located at the 107 precinct, second floor, detective squad area. Today’s date is February 5th, 2017. Time is approximately 10:33 a.m. And I’m activating the tape at this time. >> Now that I’ve advised you of your rights, are you willing to answer questions? >> Okay. Yes. >> Okay. >> All right.

>> All right. >> [snorts] >> So now, why don’t we start with I think it was a Tuesday evening on August 2nd, um, 2016. [snorts] Do you remember that that date, that evening? >> Mhm. [clears throat] >> All right. And where were you at that time? >> I was at the I was in I get way and Spring Creek Mall. >> Okay, by Gateway and Spring Creek Mall.

>> I was in park. >> Park? All right. Were you inside the park? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And was anyone with you or were you by yourself? >> By myself. >> All right. About what time did you get to the park? >> About 5:00. >> And were you on the trail or you were in the grass? >> On the trail. >> Okay.

 Now, while you were in the park, um, did something happen? >> Yes. >> What happened while you were in the park? >> I was in the park. I was just going jogging and then I and then you know one thing led to another because it gets another situation. >> All right. Well, the girl that was jogging, was she by herself or with anybody else? >> By herself.

>> And when you first saw her, where were you? Were you in the grass or were you on the trail? >> On the trail. >> All right. And were you moving or you were you standing still? >> I thought I was moving and listening to music. >> You were you were walking or jogging? >> Walking. >> Walking? And you were walking towards her? >> I was walking towards her and then I thought I decided and then one thing led to another.

>> Uh, are you saying as she got next to you, when she got next to you as you as she was running and you were walking, what happened then? >> And then, you know, it was cuz of past situation, I got angry and then I hit her in the nose and stuff that. Okay. Um, before you did When did you hit her? Like in the face and like in the mouth.

In the face and in the mouth. Before you hit her, did you grab her or did you just hit her right away? I kind of grabbed her first. Grabbed her? Then like How did you grab her? What part of her body did you did you grab? I was starting to hit her because of the incident that was going on earlier. Right.

 But did you Did you grab her before you started hitting or was it was the first thing you did was to hit her? What was the first thing you did? I grabbed her. Okay. And how did you grab her? Like this. Okay. With both hands? Mhm. Okay. And what part of her body did you grab? Do you remember her shoulders, her waist, her neck? Do you remember? Probably like around here.

Okay. You’re on the shoulders. Did she say anything at all? Mhm. No? Did she scream? >> [cough and clears throat] >> No, cuz her tooth broke. I’m sorry. Her tooth broke? Right. Were you covering her mouth at all? Mhm. No? Okay. Um, how long would you say you were hitting her for? About how how long in time I mean? The whole time was about 5 minutes.

5 minutes all right. How far [clears throat] off the path did you would you say would you say you dragged her into the grass? Like how how many feet about? About probably about 10. Okay. What What was the um, sta- status of her clothing? How was How was her clothing like? >> pulled off. >> Pulled off? >> Yeah.

>> Okay. What was pulled off? >> Like her clothes. >> Now, you said you did this because you had some anger. Is that right? >> Mhm. >> All right. Um, can you tell me about that anger? >> Cuz you know, I used to live in a different address than I currently live right now. >> Right. >> And then there is sometimes there is a man that comes around here.

He play like loud music and carry a lot of friends around here and they don’t like it cuz I feel unsafe and comfortable and I like my place private and peaceful. And you guys just >> So I know um the So now I know that uh like last night you didn’t you didn’t you really didn’t want to talk about this, right? Last night.

 But today you it was okay, you wanted to talk about it, right? I know that you told um Detective Brown you want to straighten your life out, right? >> Yes. >> And then Detective Brown said to wait until you came in the room to talk about it. That’s right? >> Mhm. >> And that’s what you did, right? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Chanel Lewis was 20 years old.

 He lived in East New York, close enough to Spring Creek that he could and regularly did walk there on foot. That proximity mattered. This wasn’t a stranger who’d traveled into the neighborhood. He was already part of it, someone who’d been seen on those same streets, near that same park months before anyone thought to look at him twice.

On the surface, there was nothing that would have drawn attention. He had no criminal record. He wasn’t known to be violent by the people who’d gone to school with him. He described himself accurately as a loner. Someone with few friends, no steady job, who walked the trails around Spring Creek because it was one of the only places he felt like he could clear his head.

But underneath that ordinary exterior sat a documented history investigators had missed the significance of twice. The threats against classmates as a teenager, the hospitalizations, the summonses tied to the exact stretch of park where Karina would later be killed. None of it on its own had ever risen to the level of a criminal charge.

Lieutenant Russo’s brief encounter with him in a hoodie on an 80-degree day months before the murder had seemed like nothing at the time. That detail at the time meant nothing. Later it meant everything. The DNA connected him to the scene. The tooth fragment pulled from his own hand connected him to her body and to the fight she’d put up before she died.

The man investigators had been searching for wasn’t hiding in some distant part of the city. He’d been walking those same trails all along. The DNA was the piece that closed the case. The profile developed from underneath Karina’s fingernails, from her neck, and from her cell phone all matched Chanel Lewis.

Investigators explained it to the public in plain terms. This wasn’t a partial or ambiguous match. It was the kind of statistical certainty that in a case with no eyewitnesses was as close to undeniable as evidence gets. Then came the physical corroboration. The injury to his hand treated the day after the murder.

 The foreign object the doctor pulled from that wound later matched to a fragment of Karina’s own broken tooth. It meant the two pieces of evidence confirmed each other. The DNA placed him at the scene. The tooth fragment placed her bite mark on his body. Investigators also had his own words. During questioning, Lewis gave two videotape statements.

In them, according to prosecutors, he’d describe what he’d done and why, describing his anger and admitting to the killing. And later, after his arrest, there was one more thread. A record of his own internet search history in the months leading up to his arrest showing searches about indictments, plea deals, and news coverage of Karina’s case.

 Each piece stood on its own. Together, they left almost nothing for a jury to reasonably dispute. Chanel Lewis was charged with second-degree murder, later indicted on 13 counts including murder AND SEXUAL ABUSE. >> [laughter] >> HE FACED LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT THE possibility of parole. He pleaded not guilty. >> Tonight, Lewis’s relatives say it’s not possible.

>> To the family, I’m sorry for their loss, but they have the wrong person. >> Richard Lewis is the suspect’s father. >> He is a wonderful young man. Wonderful young man. >> My brother is a skinny you saw on the TV. He’s a skinny guy who cannot kill such a strong girl cuz she’s a strong person.

 He is alone can never kill a person like that. >> Today, I would like to thanks all those who have reached out and give their support for me and my family. I love my son. I support my son. I raised my son to be a God-fearing man and to respect life. My son is friendly, God-fearing, and would not hurt anybody. My son has mental health problem and needs help.

 He’s not a criminal and need mental resources. Please respect my family privacy. Please respect my family privacy in this matter and allow my son to get to get do to get help in due process. >> The first trial began in November of 2018. >> It was packed inside of the courtroom filled with family and friends on both sides.

 As you mentioned, it was also very emotional. Karina Vetrano’s mother was inside of that courtroom. She held onto a cross most of the time crying. Uh Karina Vetrano’s accused killer, Chanel Lewis, obviously in the courtroom. His mother was there as well and she held onto a Bible also in tears most of the time.

 Now, opening statements got underway. Defense attorneys with the Legal Aid Society representing Lewis told jurors today, Lewis is innocent. They have serious doubts about the evidence adding there are no witnesses and Lewis was coerced into confessing and people are rushing to judgment. >> Assistant District Attorney Brad Leventhal laid out the prosecution’s theory in his opening statement.

 This was by chance, a young woman crossing paths with a man consumed by anger with nothing more than proximity connecting them. She didn’t provoke him, he told the jury. He saw her and he killed her. The defense pushed back hard. Attorney Jenny Chung argued there were no eyewitnesses, no one who could stand in that courtroom and say definitively he did it.

 She said the confession had been coerced after 10 hours of interrogation, that her client had only said what police wanted to hear so he could finally leave the room. Co-counsel Robert Miller argued the crime scene itself had been compromised, pointing to the number of people, including Karina’s own father, who had been present before it was secured.

Over 7 days, the jury heard testimony from detectives who walked through the evidence collection process in painstaking detail. Some of the crime scene photographs shown to the jury were graphic enough that Karina’s parents left the courtroom rather than see them again. >> Closing arguments at the emotional trial over the death of 30-year-old Karina Vetrano have now wrapped up.

 The prosecution painting the suspect, 22-year-old Chanel Lewis, as a frustrated, angry, and lonely young man who spotted Vetrano on an after-work jog at a park in Howard Beach and took out all his anger by taking her life. >> He was mad and he took out his anger and he took out his frustrations on Karina, grabbing her, throwing her to the ground, beating her, and strangling her until she was dead.

>> But the defense argued that it was the police department that was frustrated with their 6-month-long investigation that had yet to find a suspect, that Lewis was singled out, and that detectives worked endlessly to fit evidence they had to build a case against him. >> They never allowed the development of what the evidence to develop the theory.

 Rather, they just wanted the evidence to fit their narrative. >> [music] >> Deliberations stretched on. Jurors reviewed one of the videotape confessions for over an hour. They requested 74 pages of testimony, read back from the prosecution’s DNA expert. They asked to see the autopsy photographs again. After a day and a half, five jurors said they could not reach a guilty verdict beyond a reasonable doubt.

 The jury was deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial. >> The parents of Karina Vetrano looking somber and stunned leaving the courtroom. Relatives in tears after the judge declared a mistrial. A ruling which sent shock through the courtroom. >> Mr. Mr. Vetrano. >> Just a moment. >> No, man. >> Stunned silence from the family of Karina Vetrano moments after learning justice would be delayed.

>> The Vetrano’s family did not speak after the ruling. Lewis’s legal team, however, did. >> The jury is understanding that DNA is not all it is. Confession is not all it is. There are issues in the case that, as you will see, is much more complex. >> Is this a win for you? >> Well, it’s not a conviction, so I I guess that’s a good thing, but um closure would be a good thing, too.

>> For Karina’s family, it meant living through all of it again. The retrial began in March of 2019. This time with additional evidence, including Lewis’s own internet search history. The defense maintained his innocence and argued the confession had been coerced, pointing out that if he were truly the killer, more of his DNA should have turned up throughout the scene.

The night before deliberations were set to begin, an anonymous letter reached defense attorneys, alleging that early in the investigation, an NYPD chief had told colleagues they were looking for two specific men from Howard Beach, and alleging that police had swabbed DNA and from hundreds of men in the area as a part of the search.

The defense called it evidence the department had withheld other leads. Prosecutors called the letter unverified and an 11th-hour attempt to derail the trial. On April 1st, 2019, the jury returned a verdict, guilty. Even then, the case wasn’t finished. >> The verdict was in. Everyone was holding their breath.

>> We, the jury, find the defendant guilty. >> A VERY DIFFERENT RESPONSE THIS TIME around from Vetrano’s parents leaving the courtroom. >> Tell us what’s going through your mind right now. This is Vetrano. >> Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Any other thoughts? >> Jubilation. Justice. >> Justice has been served.

>> I’m thanking those jurors for listening to the overwhelming evidence. >> All the anger, all the years of pain, but mostly the anger was lifted. It was gone. >> Lewis lifted his handcuffed hands in a farewell wave to his family and supporters as he was led off to jail. Some of those supporters today say they followed the case very closely and a family spokesperson says they question the verdict.

>> How does a young man walk into Howard Beach, murder a young lady that was physically fit, and walk out of Howard Beach without being seen on any camera from the Gateway Mall, any camera in Howard Beach at all? >> A juror later alleged misconduct during deliberations. Claims that other jurors had introduced outside information and personal experience into the jury room, including one juror’s account of a past personal experience and another comparing the injuries to an unrelated case she’d sat on before.

The judge held a hearing, reviewed sworn affidavits from the jurors involved, and ultimately rejected the claims. At sentencing on April 23rd, 2019, the judge added 32 years on top of Lewis’s life sentence. He addressed both families directly, calling it a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.

 A parent’s worst nightmare on one side and a life spent in a cage on the other. Chief Assistant District Attorney John Ryan said Lewis had shown no remorse for what he called a heinous killing and said he hoped the sentence gave Karina’s family some measure of comfort knowing the person responsible would never be free again.

 Outside the courthouse, Lewis’ mother and supporters gathered. Some shouting accusations at the lead prosecutor as he left. A petition calling for the case to be reviewed by the city’s conviction integrity unit gathered 40,000 signatures. The questions around the investigation’s early days never fully went away in the public conversation, but legally the case was over.

Two trials, one mistrial, years of appeals and hearings, and in the end a conviction and a sentence that stood. The case left behind more than a conviction. It left open questions about how the investigation itself had been run. The most serious of those questions centered on the anonymous letter that surfaced before the retrial’s deliberations.

 The allegation that early in the case an NYPD chief had directed detectives toward a narrow description of suspects and that officers had swabbed DNA and gathered from hundreds of men across Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods in the course of the search. The department never confirmed those specific comments and prosecutors dismissed the letter as unverified and untimely.

But the underlying practice, a DNA dragnet of that scale concentrated on a particular set of neighborhoods, was never seriously disputed as having happened. No formal disciplinary action against the department is documented in connection with those allegations. The claims were raised in court, addressed in hearings, and the case proceeded to conviction regardless.

One concrete policy change did come out of the case, though it arrived too late to affect it. In June 2017, the New York State Commission on Forensic Science voted to permit familial DNA searching in murder, rape, and certain other serious cases. The The technique Philip spent months petitioning for after New York’s absence from the list of states using it left investigators without a tool that might have moved things faster.

Civil liberties advocates had had objected arguing the practice risk pulling innocent relatives of offenders into investigations based on nothing but genetics. The commission approved it anyway. By the time it took effect, Chanel Lewis had already been identified through more conventional means. The change made no difference in Karina’s case.

 It remains available in everyone since. The questions about how the park itself was patrolled were acknowledged publicly by federal officials during the investigation, but no documented changes to Gateway National Recreation Area’s patrol coverage followed in the years after. Karina Vetrano was a daughter who still lived at home, not because her life hadn’t started yet, but because she was building it exactly the way she wanted to.

 A speech pathologist who spent her days teaching children to find words, a woman barely 5 ft tall with a laugh that filled up whatever room she walked into. That photo taken in the kitchen, her mother walking past in the background, not even looking at the camera, was never meant to be anything. Just a moment before a run, the kind she’d taken a thousand times before.

 It became the last picture anyone ever took of her. What was taken wasn’t just a life. It was every year after it, and the career she was still building, the family she hadn’t started yet, every ordinary Tuesday she would have lived and never thought twice about. She went out for a run on a summer evening the way she always did, and this time she didn’t come home.

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