Karina Vetrano

The first Karina Vetrano murder trial began on November 5, 2018. Lewis had pleaded not guilty to murder and sex abuse charges, and faced a sentence of either 25 years or life in prison. On November 7, Phil Vetrano testified in court on how he created a search party to find his daughter's body. Two days later, jurors watched a video tape of Lewis' confession to the murder. The tape had been previously played at a 2017 pretrial hearing in Queens Supreme Court. On November 14, forensic biologist Linda Razzano testified that Lewis' DNA had a one in 6 trillion chance of someone else sharing a genetic profile. Dr. Margaret Prial, who performed Karina Vetrano's autopsy, described Vetrano's injuries, including a compressed carotid artery in her neck. The next day, Assistant District Attorney Brad Leventhal asked Judge Michael Aloise to dismiss nine of the counts against Chanel Lewis. Four counts remained in the indictment: one of first-degree murder, two of second-degree murder, and one of first-degree sexual abuse. The first trial ended with a hung jury due to defensive arguments as well as claims that the DNA evidence was contaminated.

On November 21, 2018, a judge declared a mistrial, and tentatively scheduled a retrial for January 22, 2019; the retrial was later rescheduled for March 2019. In the retrial, Chanel Lewis was found guilty on two counts of second-degree murder, one count of first-degree murder, and one count of sexual abuse on April 1, 2019, after five hours of deliberation. The sentencing hearing was initially scheduled for April 17, with expectations of a sentence to the maximum penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole. A few days before the scheduled sentencing, however, Lewis's attorneys requested and received a delay, so they could introduce allegations of misconduct among several members of the jury which convicted him. On April 23, 2019, Lewis was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

On February 4, 2017, the police announced that a suspect in the strangulation death of Karina Vetrano had been taken into questioning, later adding that Chanel R. Lewis, a 20-year-old Brooklyn resident, was placed under arrest and charged with one count of second-degree murder.

On August 2, 2016, in the late afternoon, Vetrano went for a run in Spring Creek Park, less than a block away from her home. She ran alone, despite the expressed concerns of her father, her usual running partner, who was suffering from a back injury. She was last seen alive after 5 p.m, just before she entered the park.

In December 2016, the FBI and the NYPD developed and shared a suspect profile of who may have killed Vetrano.

Lewis also had several run-ins with police in the years before the murder, including three summons in 2013: two for violating rules in Spring Creek Park and one for urinating in public. An additional incident occurred in May 2016 when a 9-1-1 caller reported a suspicious male with a crowbar in the backyards of several homes. An NYPD lieutenant who lived in Howard Beach also remembered him lurking around in the area looking into cars and traced him from when Lewis's name and address had been taken by police during a stop-and-frisk report.

Karina Anne Vetrano (July 12, 1986 – August 2, 2016) was a 30-year-old American woman who was attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered while running in Spring Creek Park in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York City. The case attracted national media attention, partially due to how it went unsolved for nearly six months. A suspect, Chanel Lewis, was arrested and charged with her murder in February 2017 after being linked by DNA evidence. Lewis' trial began on November 5, 2018, and ended in a mistrial on November 21, 2018. A retrial took place in March 2019. On April 1, 2019, Lewis was found guilty on three counts of murder and one count of sexual abuse; he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Karina Anne Vetrano was born July 12, 1986, in New York to Phillip and Cathie Vetrano. She had two siblings; a brother and a sister. Her father, a New York City Fire Department retiree, was one of the first responders at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks. She attended Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens and graduated from St. John's University with a master's degree in speech pathology. An aspiring writer, she appeared in a 2013 short film inspired by her writings and directed by her screenwriter friend Petros Georgiadis. She lived in the same Queens neighborhood as her parents and worked with children with autism in Manhattan as a speech pathologist.