Mom’s final hug
Tells Qns. jury of last moments with Karina
The last time Catherine Vetrano saw her daughter alive she had just tossed her a hard-boiled egg from the top of the staircase to put in the fridge.
Karina Vetrano caught it at the foot of the steps, put it away, then went out for an early-evening jog in a nearby Queens park.
The mom never saw her alive again.
Catherine Vetrano testified for the first time Tuesday in the trial of Chanel Lewis, who is accused of murdering Karina as she jogged in Spring Creek park in Howard Beach on Aug. 2, 2016. Lewis, 20 at the time, was tried for that crime once before with no criminal consequences — the jury deadlocked in November ending it in a mistrial.
On Tuesday, the retrial entered its second day.
The lead defense attorney, Robert Moeller, argued Karina’s mother should not have been allowed to testify because there was, in his opinion, nothing of substance she could bring to the trial. But the judge allowed her to speak.
Catherine — dressed in all black with a butterfly broach affixed to her chest — battled through tears in the Queens courtroom to describe her last moments together with her 30-yearold daughter.
She had returned that afternoon after having surgery at Sloan Kettering in Manhattan. When she got home, she waited downstairs for her daughter.
“She was glad to see me,” Catherine recalled. “She had wanted to visit me in the hospital the night before, but I didn’t want her taking the train home at night from the city.”
They talked and gave each other a kiss and a hug before Catherine went up to her bedroom to rest.
Once Catherine got upstairs, she realized she’d forgotten a hard-boiled egg in her bag she’d taken from the hospital. She called to Karina, and there she was, at the foot of the stairs, already decked out in her workout gear.
“She appeared beautiful as always,” Catherine said.
Her husband Phillip Vetrano was downstairs eating dinner. A while later Catherine remembered him screaming loudly: “F—!”
“I yelled down, said ‘What’s wrong?’ ” she said. “He told me Karina had gone out running and he was trying to call her and she was not answering the phone after several calls … he said he was going out to go see where she was.”
Phillip left to search for his daughter. Catherine walked downstairs.
“I tried to call her as I was standing at the window,” she said.
No one answered, and her anxiety mounted when an NYPD canine unit came to her for clothing to track her daughter. The feeling eventually gave way to horror when she was confronted with the worst outcome — Karina was gone.
“My son, who had been among family members [and] people who had come, came out over to me and told me that Karina had passed away,” she said.
“I just remember, I was screaming in the streets,” she continued. “I saw my husband … he just came, and we grabbed each other, and we were just crying.”