Some violence unsettles us not only because of what it is, but because of where it happens—the path you walk every day, the stretch of road you had come to trust. Shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday, a twenty-eight-year-old woman was training for the New York City Marathon on the Shore Parkway Greenway in Brooklyn's Bath Beach. She was running along the bike path, half a mile from where her parents were waiting for her. She called them to say she was almost there. Then the call went dead. Her father went looking for her and found her on the path, suffering from multiple stab wounds to her neck.
On Saturday, the NYPD released her photograph and asked for the public's help. Katie Suarez, twenty-eight, remained in critical condition at NYU Langone Brooklyn Hospital. Police are seeking anyone who was in the area of the Belt Parkway eastbound bike path between Bay 8th Street and Bay 17th Street on Friday between 7:56 p.m. and 8:12 p.m. There is no suspect and no known motive. Investigators searched the surrounding area on Saturday, using drones and boats, and the greenway was closed.
The difficulty with this path is its quiet. Runners and cyclists told local media that it becomes very dark after nightfall, with little lighting and few cameras beyond the glow of traffic on the nearby highway. "It's scary. But I always try not to run alone, always with somebody," one runner said after police turned her away from the closed path. There is a daily compromise in that sentence, an arithmetic that women learn early about public space: adjust the hour, find a companion, avoid the dark. Suarez was running at eight on a Friday night. In the schedule of marathon training, it may have been an ordinary arrangement.
The New York City Marathon is only days away. Tens of thousands of runners will cross the city's five boroughs, moving along streets lined with cheering crowds. Suarez was supposed to be one of them. She was training for it, on a Friday evening, along a route she had likely run many times before. Then someone she may never have seen changed everything.
The police request is specific: any information, anyone who passed that stretch during that window, anyone who saw something out of the ordinary. Crime Stoppers is waiting for calls. But for those who live nearby and run on that path, there is something quieter beneath the request—a re-examination of an everyday space. The path is no longer just a path. It has become a place that must be remembered.
The investigation continues. Suarez remains in the hospital. The marathon will go on. And the greenway, at some point, will reopen, the runners will return, and night will fall again. No one can say what a woman running alone there at eight o'clock will think of the next time she passes.
Image Disclaimer: The visual accompanying this article was generated by artificial intelligence and is not a photograph of the actual individual or scene.
Sources: ABC7 New York, News 12, Yahoo News
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