Rant #1,755: What Happened?

A beautiful young lady goes out jogging, as she had so many times before, and she is never seen alive again.

That is the basic story of what happened on August 2, when young, pert Karina Vetrano went jogging in Howard Beach, Queens, New York, did not return, and her remains were later found.

She evidently had been savagely attacked by someone, but to this day, nobody knows by who.

During this hot summer, this is probably the No. 1 mystery plaguing the NYPD, and it is probably the top news story of the summer in the New York Metropolitan area.

Now, a short surveillance video has been released, probably showing her mere minutes before she was murdered.

I won't put up anything here, just the link, https://www.yahoo.com/celebrity/surveillance-video-shows-slain-n-195018070.html.

Normally, Vetrano went out jogging with her dad, but on this day, he was not feeling well, and so she ventured out alone.

She ran across an area bordering the Belt Parkway, a major roadway in New York City that stretches from Brooklyn, through Queens--across the Howard Beach section, where the incident took place--and it becomes the Southern State Parkway when it hits Nassau County, and continues out east through Suffolk County.

The area she jogged in is highly wooded, part federal parkland, and that is why not only the NYPD, but the FBI, is looking into this murder, because some of the land there is in the FBI's domain.

In this wooded section, many vagrants live, and the NYPD has been studying DNA they obtained from the woman's body--there is plenty of it, as they say she put up quite a struggle before succumbing--and using it as a tool to find out who committed this crime.

So far, nothing has turned up, on local databases, national databases ... nothing. No matches at all have turned up, but the DNA will be kept and studied further, should the person commit another crime in the future.

With the NYPD and FBI not finding anything, the family of the slain woman said that they might hire their own private investigator to look into the case.

They want justice, and the father has said that they plan on seeing justice served in this case.

The New York Metropolitan area has been taken by this story, probably because the young lady was a really pretty woman, and she was very innocently just going out and doing her daily routine.

Like so many young people, there are plenty of selfies of her, plenty of photos to document her short life.

I think that all New Yorkers reflect on her and what happened to her, and they kind of look at their own families, and say that if it happened to her, it could very well happen to them.

As a father, and the father of a daughter, yes, I do worry a bit about her safety in these times, but I don't think about it every minute of every day.

But as a parent, no matter how old my child is--my daughter is 28 years of age--I still worry about her, worry about her well-being.

It is part of being a parent; you want the best for your kids, and I want the best for my daughter and my son.

This one was something of a wakeup call, much like the infamous Etan Patz case has been for the past 30-plus years. Patz went to the bus stop to go to school one day, and never returned. The murderer has been at large for all these years, but one mentally ill man has confessed. His trial went to a hung jury the last time, and he is being tried again.

But that was a wakeup call that you simply can't let kids do certain things unsupervised like we did when we were growing up.

This is similar in that whether they want to or not, people should go out in pairs while jogging, in particular in secluded areas away from mass traffic.

That video I spoke about showed probably the final moments of the woman's life, and in a perfect world, those moments would not be captured on surveillance video.

I am sure they will find out who did this to her. There is a sketch of a person of interest, and you can bet that in this case, the public is not being told everything the police and FBI know.

Finding out who this person is, and the later trial and sentencing, will bring some level of closure to the family, but it will never bring full closure.

A young lady's life was snuffed out for no apparent reason; it simply can't.