Sayed Mohassib

Introduction

Sayed Mohassib, 27, a one-time NYPD recruit working as a New York City Department of Education school aide, was charged with second-degree murder on Saturday, November 7, 2026, in the death of Katie Suarez, a 28-year-old bank teller stabbed while jogging along Brooklyn’s Shore Parkway Greenway promenade on October 30 . He was arraigned late the same day in Brooklyn criminal court, where prosecutors said Suarez’s blood was splattered across the walls of his apartment and that he had stated he tried to clean it, and where a judge ordered him held behind bars . Police sources told the New York Post that Mohassib admitted to the slashing but said he remembers nothing of the attack, claiming he woke from a blackout covered in blood with the murder weapon in his possession . He was identified after surveillance video captured him leaving the park around the time Suarez was attacked, and officers tracked him to his home . A criminal complaint reported by the Post the following day adds the account he gave detectives: he said he was at the park with a knife because “people were going to come and kill his family,” and, pressed under questioning, told cops he “did not stab anyone” — a statement that sits alongside, and does not match, the police-source account of an admission . Law-enforcement sources said officers identified him using facial-recognition technology teamed with records already in several government systems, including the fingerprints and photos on file from his brief NYPD stint and his Department of Education work . The charge was filed a week after Suarez — kept on life support so her organs could be donated — died of her wounds . The admissions described in this page come from police sources quoted in press coverage and from a prosecutor’s statements at the arraignment; no plea appears in the coverage, and Mohassib’s attorney, Edward Mandery, has so far addressed only his client’s conditions of confinement, not the evidence . The Department of Education said Mohassib had been suspended from his school job after the arrest, with a spokesperson calling student safety the department’s “very top priority” — and, in a statement to PEOPLE, saying it “will move to terminate employment pending the outcome of the conviction” .

Background Information

Mohassib’s brief law-enforcement career ended before it began, according to the police sources who spoke to the Post: he left the NYPD after one month to enlist in the Marines, was discharged by the Marines due to what the sources called apparent mental instability, attempted to rejoin the NYPD and was denied, and then joined the Department of Education . A later Post report put the NYPD stint at a brief six weeks on the force, ending when he left for the Marines, and said per police sources that the Marines deemed him psychologically unfit for service — the reason cited when the NYPD declined his request to rejoin the force . The complaint report added that when Mohassib attempted to return to the NYPD he was turned down after appearing “disheveled” and over other disturbing signs, per sources . The Daily News, citing police sources with knowledge of the case, reported that he was discharged from the Marines for psychological reasons and could not rejoin the NYPD because of that discharge . At the time of the attack he was working as a school aide at P.S. 200 — the Post places the school in Bensonhurst, the Daily News in Bath Beach, just a few blocks from the waterfront where Suarez was stabbed . He and Suarez attended Brooklyn College at the same time, though it is not clear whether the two ever knew each other . Mohassib also played on Brooklyn College’s basketball team as a freshman, logging nineteen minutes across three games in the 2018-19 season — ten points, five rebounds, one assist and three turnovers, according to the school’s athletics department . The Marines discharge came in 2022 for being psychologically unfit, per the Post’s DOE-sources report, which added that it is unclear how long Mohassib worked as a teacher’s aide — a paraprofessional post at P.S. 200 paying $182 a day that a substitute can only take after a principal nominates him .

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Arraigned; held behind bars; fired from his DOE school job. Mohassib, 27, stands accused — per police sources quoted by the New York Post and Daily News and per a Brooklyn prosecutor’s statements at his arraignment — of stabbing Katie Suarez to death as she jogged along the Shore Parkway Greenway on the night of October 30, 2026, and of admitting the killing while telling investigators his memory of it was erased by a blackout. At the late-Saturday hearing, Assistant District Attorney Jordan Rossman said Suarez’s blood was splattered across the walls of Mohassib’s Bensonhurst apartment, that he stated he had tried to clean it, and that he “made admissions and there are video recordings”; Judge John McPadden ordered him held behind bars and did not order a psychiatric evaluation after defense counsel said none was needed. Nothing has been tested at trial: no plea appears in the coverage, and the blackout account remains a claim attributed to unnamed police sources.

Suarez, a TD Bank teller, had gotten off work at the Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center branch in Gravesend on the evening of October 30 and met her mother in front of a nearby Wendy’s around 6:50 p.m. — a family ritual ahead of their regular after-work run . She changed into running clothes, passed her work uniform to her mother, and set off along the Shore Parkway Greenway promenade; her father, an MTA bus driver, was running late, and she left before he arrived . Around 8:15 p.m., near Bay 17th Street and Shore Parkway by the Belt Parkway, she was stabbed multiple times in the neck . She had sent a final message saying she was five minutes from the meeting point; when she failed to appear, her parents split up to search, and her father found her less than a mile away under a tree, bleeding from two neck wounds, and flagged a passing cyclist to call 911 .

Suarez was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, where she was pronounced brain dead and kept on life support so her organs could be harvested and donated . She died on Monday, November 2, three days after the attack . Police characterized the killing as bearing all the markings of a random attack: she was not robbed or sexually assaulted, and her family said she had no known enemies or boyfriends . The NYPD offered a $10,000 reward and scoured the waterfront with K9 and aviation units, drones, and scuba divers . The break came from surveillance video placing Mohassib leaving the park around the time of the attack; after officers tracked him to his home, sources say he admitted the slashing but claimed amnesia — he told investigators he woke up from a blackout covered in blood with the weapon still in his possession . Investigators believe he threw the knife in the garbage, and that it traveled from a Staten Island landfill to a New Jersey dump, where the search for it continued as the charge was announced . Footage also allegedly showed Mohassib disposing of trash bags near his residence on the night Suarez was killed, per NBC News reporting cited by PEOPLE . The Daily News reported that Department of Education officials confirmed Mohassib’s employment and the second-degree murder charge .

The account Mohassib gave investigators is laid out in more detail in the Brooklyn criminal complaint the Post reported on November 8: he allegedly told detectives he believed he had to go to the park that day or “people” would hurt his family; he claimed he left the park for the nearby Verrazzano Bridge, returned, “sat down on bench, and became covered in blood, including on his jacket, pants and clothes”; and, under questioning, he told cops he “did not stab anyone” . Per the complaint, he then ran back to his Bensonhurst home, “emerging 15 minutes later wearing only underwear and subsequently throwing items into a garbage chute,” and told officers he “got rid of the bloody clothing, and got rid of the knife” — with sources adding that detectives are now scouring a sanitation barge for the murder weapon, extending the landfill-and-dump search described when the charge was announced . He also acknowledged he “had blood on his hands and got blood in his apartment, which he attempted to clean,” “further identified himself on video surveillance footage,” and described walls inside his room splattered with blood that he said he tried and failed to clean .

At the arraignment late Saturday in Brooklyn criminal court, Assistant District Attorney Jordan Rossman told the court that officers had found the forensic evidence shortly after locating Mohassib at his Bensonhurst address: Suarez’s blood was splattered across his apartment walls, and “the defendant stated that he had tried to clean the blood,” Rossman said . Rossman also said Mohassib “made admissions and there are video recordings” in the case, and that Suarez had died at a hospital from puncture wounds to the neck; prosecutors offered no motive and gave no further details . Mohassib, appearing in flip-flops and a matching Von Dutch outfit, said nothing during the hearing except to pipe up once and correct Judge John McPadden’s pronunciation of his name .

Before the arrest, Mohassib had returned to work at P.S. 200 in the days before he was taken into custody, where colleagues noticed him speaking incoherently and acting erratically and reported the concerning behavior to police — though per police sources those reports were not what ultimately led to his arrest . Students at his school, quoted in PEOPLE’s account of the Post’s reporting, described similar signs that week: one said Mohassib was acting “a little bit, like, I don’t know, weird. A bit off,” and two others said they saw him talking to himself, one describing him as seeming “nervous” and “worried” . A motive in the killing has not been identified, per that report .

Public Reaction and Consequences

Suarez’s mother, Yasira Suarez, became the case’s public voice as the family waited out the week before the arrest. Outside their Brooklyn home, she said her daughter “just wanted to run” and demanded the killer surrender: “You took an angel” . “Please, just turn yourself in,” she said. “You did this once, don’t let it happen again… Because what you did to this person, you took away a little angel” . She described the family’s closeness — “mom and dad were always there for her” — and the particular weight on her husband, the father who found their daughter: “It’s even harder for him, because he was the one who found her” . Neighbors in Bath Beach remembered Suarez as “family oriented” and “a very soft spoken girl, very nice,” a “very professional, very kind” teller at the local branch; one local, Anna Dece, said simply, “It’s too much right now. It’s a mad world” . In Bensonhurst, where Mohassib lived with his family, neighbors expressed shock at the arrest — one, Rosa, 65, told the Post, “I think he’s a good boy – no conflict with nobody. He smiles, he says hi. His mom is good” .

Mohassib’s own side of the story remained thin. He said nothing on the record at his arraignment; his attorney, Edward Mandery, asked that he be placed in protective custody — “I just want to make sure my client doesn’t get hurt,” Mandery told the Post, adding, “I don’t know if you guys heard there has been a lot of media attention on this case” — and said a psychiatric evaluation was not needed “at this time” . When a Post reporter knocked at Mohassib’s home on Sunday, a woman who spoke through the door declined to comment: “I am in very deep pain right now. I don’t want to talk,” she said; the city Board of Education likewise did not respond to a Sunday request for comment . By Sunday evening the family’s side was on the record: Mohassib’s mother, Fatma Mohassib, told the Post from the family’s Brooklyn home that her son “right now… needs help” — describing him as “a Boy Scout, a black belt… an excellent boy in every area” who went “to the mosque all his life” and to Brooklyn College, and saying he did not know Suarez . She maintained he was “never aggressive” — “he never hit me or hurt his sister,” she said — while acknowledging he had been hospitalized in psych wards for as long as two months in recent years, and she offered the victim’s family an apology: “I’m so, so sorry for the family… My heart go deep for the mother and the father for the girl she passed away. Just I’d like to say to everyone, we both lost. You lost your daughter. I lost my son” . She added that Mohassib’s father also suffers from mental illness and is currently locked up in a psych ward the family visits weekly, while saying she did not believe her son’s struggles were tied to his father’s .

The arrest also turned the DOE’s hiring screen itself into the story, under the Post headline “Teacher’s aide bust in jogger slay shows DOE vetting system is broken: insiders” . One DOE source told the paper that hiring usually means “just looking for someone with a pulse, it can be really hit or miss, but it’s usually miss” . Former Deputy Chancellor Eric Nadelstern said every DOE employee undergoes an FBI background check that should have flagged the Marine discharge, but described a loophole in which a psychologist’s note that the employee was treating a mental illness could still clear the hire . A second source familiar with DOE hiring said screenings back up for a combination of money and operational reasons, warning “Until they fix these issues, there will be more incidents like this,” and Community Education Council 20 president John Ricottone — who said he does not fault P.S. 200 Principal Danielle Nola — called on the DOE to screen candidates’ mental health alongside background checks, noting paraprofessionals often work with the city’s most vulnerable and disabled students . The department itself told PEOPLE it “will move to terminate employment pending the outcome of the conviction” and is “supporting the NYPD in their investigation however is needed” .

The consequences caught up with the job and the past. On Monday, November 9, the Department of Education said Mohassib had been fired from his P.S. 200 position — following a public call by Mayor Zohran Mamdani for a thorough investigation into his city schools employment . Law-enforcement sources told the Post he had returned to work with kids at the school three days after the October 30 slaying, while the search for Suarez’s killer was still underway; parents reacted with alarm — “You don’t know who is teaching our kids. It’s just shocking,” said Jasmine Cotto, a parent of a first- and second-grader at the school, who added, “He came here the next day like nothing happened” and “what if he came here and started killing kids or the teachers?” Another father, Joseph Hasbani, said his daughter recognized Mohassib from television: “Dad, I see him every day!… He’s in my school” . The same sources account added new layers to his history: his mother told police he once killed the family pet, a cat or dog; cops had responded in 2024 to a report at his Bensonhurst home that he threatened to chop up his family; and investigators cracked the case with park surveillance footage plus facial-recognition technology run on photos he had needed for his government and public-service work .

Current Status

Mohassib was arraigned late on Saturday, November 7, 2026, in Brooklyn criminal court before Judge John McPadden on charges of second-degree murder, weapons possession and tampering with evidence — a charge set matching the NYPD statement reported by PEOPLE . McPadden ordered him held behind bars and did not order a psychiatric evaluation after Mandery said one was not needed “at this time,” and Mohassib’s next court date is November 10 . The case against him rests on charging-stage claims — prosecutor statements, police-source accounts, and the statements recorded in the criminal complaint — that remain untested at trial; he is presumed innocent, no plea appears in the coverage, and the claimed blackout as well as the complaint’s quoted statements — the family-threat account and the denial of stabbing anyone — are so far accounts to investigators, not evidence aired in court . The hunt for the murder weapon — traced from a Staten Island landfill to a New Jersey dump in the earlier reports, and now extended to a sanitation barge detectives are scouring — was still underway, and the police investigation remains open . A Department of Education spokesperson said Mohassib had been suspended with termination to follow pending the conviction’s outcome, and that support and resources were being given to the school community — a step the department completed on November 9, announcing he had been fired: “The safety of our students is our very top priority” .

Impact on Their Career/Life

The prosecution ends, in one stroke, the employment path the sources trace — NYPD recruit, Marine discharge, Department of Education school aide at P.S. 200, the school sitting blocks from the promenade where Suarez was killed — and the DOE made it official on November 9, announcing Mohassib had been fired from the P.S. 200 job . At 27, his name is now attached to one of the year’s most-covered New York City killings, and his court appearances — next on November 10 — will be watched for the first public airing of the blackout claim his attorney has so far declined to test . For Suarez’s family, the week between her death and the charge closed with an arrest their mother had publicly begged for — but the account of a blackout, if credited, would make the killing random in a way that offers no answer to why their daughter was the one attacked . Suarez — born in El Salvador, a 2020 Brooklyn College graduate who had banked at TD since 2021 and was training for a November 14 race — is remembered in the coverage for the organ donations her final week made possible . Officials revealed Sunday, through the organ-donation group LiveOnNY, that her donated heart, both kidneys, liver and pancreas — and the “gift of sight” — saved four people between the ages of 12 and 75, three of them New Yorkers and one a Florida resident: “Ms. Suarez saved the lives of four people with five of her organs to those waiting on the national transplant waitlist,” the organization said, with its president and CEO Leonard Achan saying LiveOnNY was “humbled and honored to be the stewards of these precious gifts of life so that Katie’s legacy and others may live on” .

Sources

• New York Post, “Exclusive | Mom of ex-NYPD cop accused of killing NYC jogger Katie Suarez speaks out,” November 8, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “New details emerge about lives saved with organs from tragic NYC jogger Katie Suarez,” November 8, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Deranged twist in case of ex-NYPD cop who allegedly killed jogger Katie Suarez,” November 8, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Ex-cop Sayed Mohassib had NYC jogger Katie Suarez’s blood splattered over his apartment walls after alleged murder: prosecutors,” November 7, 2026 — source
• PEOPLE, “Former NYPD Officer Charged in Fatal Stabbing of Brooklyn Jogger Katie Suarez,” November 7, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Ex-NYPD maniac admitted to slashing NYC jogger Katie Suarez: police,” November 7, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Troubled ex-NYPD cop, former Marine accused in NYC jogger Katie Suarez’s fatal stabbing appears emotionless in resurfaced photos,” November 7, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Teacher’s aide bust in jogger slay shows DOE vetting system is broken: insiders,” November 7, 2026 — source
• New York Daily News, “NYPD arrests NYC substitute school aide in murder of Brooklyn jogger Katie Suarez,” November 7, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Stabbed NYC jogger has died: family,” November 3, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “NYC jogger Katie Suarez declared brain dead in random Brooklyn stabbing remembered,” October 31, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Ex-cop Sayed Mohassib had NYC jogger Katie Suarez’s blood splattered over his apartment walls…,” November 8, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Ex-NYPD maniac admitted to slashing NYC jogger Katie Suarez…,” November 7, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Teacher’s aide bust in jogger slay shows DOE vetting system is broken: insiders,” November 7, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Deranged twist in case of ex-NYPD cop who allegedly killed jogger Katie Suarez,” November 8, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Mom of ex-NYPD cop accused of jogger murder complains she ’lost’ her son — and sends message to victim’s family,” November 8, 2026 — source
• New York Post, “Ex-cop accused of killing jogger went to work with kids at NYC school after slaying — and previously killed family pet: sources,” November 9, 2026 — source
• @nypost on X, “Mamdani vows ‘full review’ after accused jogger killer lands NYC school job despite troubling past,” November 10, 2026 — source