Queens, NY – A man was taken into custody on Saturday in connection with last summer’s murder of a woman found sexually assaulted and murdered along a jogging path in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach, New York police said.
The man, who was not named, was being questioned in the case but had not been charged, NYPD officer Tiffany Phillips said in a telephone interview Saturday night.
The victim, 30-year-old Karina Vetrano, told her father, a retired New York firefighter, that she was going out for a run Aug. 2, and never returned home, according to multiple media reports.
Her father was with detectives when her body was found, the New York Daily News reported.
Phillips said that the man in custody was a “person of interest” in the case. She declined to call him a suspect.
He was described as an East New York resident in his 20s who lives in public housing and had no history of violent crimes, sources said.
A law enforcement source said detectives zeroed in on the man after combing through stop and frisk reports from the neighborhoods near the scene of Vetrano’s killing.
The suspect was questioned last year after cops spotted him acting suspiciously in the area.
As reported by Vos Iz Neias