KARINA WAS OUR WHOLE LIFE: DAD
“She was my life,” the father of tragic Howard Beach jogger Karina Vetrano told 400 mourners at her funeral Mass Saturday — as his daughter’s rapist-murderer remained at large.
“She lived every day as if it were her last, getting every second of living in her every minute,” the father, Philip, said in a moving eulogy.
It was Philip who found her body while joining in the police search, discovering her in the marshes off a jogging path at Spring Creek Park near their home.
“She did more in those short 30 years than 10 people do in a lifetime,” the father told mourners, with Vetrano’s mother, Cathy, at his side at St. Helen Church in Howard Beach.
“We weren’t just father and daughter, we were like one and the same,” he said of the beautiful brunette, who in turn had called him “My hero” and “My best friend” in congratulating him online on his 60th birthday.
She and her father, a retired firefighter, typically jogged together, but he had been sidelined by a back injury on Tuesday, the night she died, and against his wishes she jogged alone.
The father found her four hours later, after calling the police when his calls to her cellphone went unanswered.
“She was my life,” the father told mourners.
“And words cannot describe how much love I have for her and how much I’m going to miss her.”
The mother read a poem she had written to her daughter in 2003, when she was a senior in high school and away on a retreat. In the poem, the mom compared her vibrant daughter to a tiger, “Brilliant, resilient, wicked and loud. Powerful, dangerous, reckless and proud.”
Yet, “When she does stumble, as all of us do . . . the gregarious warrior stands up and does fight,” the mom continued.
Thirteen years later, Vetrano, a cocktail waitress and avid athlete, would fight fiercely for her life — getting bruised and battered and losing a tooth, police said — before dying of strangulation.
There was hardly a dry eye in the church as the mom read.
“The heart of the lion, the soul of a lamb. Trust me, I do see you. I do understand.”
The mother ended her eulogy by saying, “Karina my baby, you shine and you glow,” at which point the sobbing audience members rose to their feet and applauded.
“Don’t stand up and clap for me,” the mother told them. “If you’re clapping, just clap for my baby.”
The Rev. Francis Colamaria noted that not just the neighborhood, but the city, is racked by grief.
She was a bright light, he said, “in fact, one that could light up your very life.”
He added, “I saw that smile as her father showed me a photo he took of Karina at the Grand Canyon.
“As if she had been at the top of the world.”
Police are awaiting the results of DNA tests on evidence gathered at the crime scene. They believe she was attacked by a stranger in a crime that continues to haunt the neighborhood.
“People are scared,” said one longtime resident. “They’re thinking someone’s on the run. They have no leads.”
Added another resident Saturday, “You think, how can she just get snatched like that?”