Jurors watch Karina Vetrano’s alleged killer’s chilling confession
Jurors watched the chilling confession tape Friday of the man who admitted randomly killing a young Queens jogger — taking her life because he was “mad at her.”
In his confession to cops, Chanel Lewis, 20, claimed he got angry at victim Karina Vetrano, 30, when she tried to fight him off at Spring Creek Park in Queens in 2016.
So he punched her five times, then dragged her “by the hands” into the tall grass beside the jogging path.
There “I finished her off,” he tells cops, vaguely, in the disturbing recording.
The tape had been previously played in Queens Supreme Court a year ago, at a pretrial hearing. But jurors, seeing it for the first time, paid intent attention as Lewis implicated himself.
“I was beating her and was mad at her,” Lewis says in the video.
Much of what Lewis says in the mumbled, rambling confession contradicts autopsy evidence.
The athletic brunette had died of strangulation; in the tape, however, Lewis claims that she “drowned,” as if by accident.
“There was a puddle of water,” he said. “She fell into it and then she was drowning.”
Lewis also says on the tape that he never sexually assaulted Vetrano, despite her tell-tale lacerations — and despite her jogging clothes having been partially removed.
“I didn’t do any of the other stuff they said,” he insists on the tape. “Sexual assault and other stuff.”
Lewis, of East New York, Brooklyn, has been on trial this week in the murder.
Prosecutors say Lewis leaped out at Vetrano as she jogged through a park near her Howard Beach home on an early August 2016 evening. He overpowered and assaulted her, leaving her strangled, partially stripped corpse in the tall grasses.
He has been linked to the murder by DNA evidence and his confession, prosecutors told jurors.
A few hours after he was taped confessing to cops, Lewis made another taped confession for prosecutors, which was also played in court Friday.
This time he admitted to the strangulation, responding “Yeah,” when asked if he had squeezed Vetrano’s neck.
Asked if she had tried to hit him, Lewis answered, “Yeah. She was scratching me.”
Again, Lewis insisted he hadn’t sexually assaulted Vetrano; he did admit that when he punched her, he hurt his hand on her teeth.
That punch may now have come back to hurt him again. Prosecutors showed jurors hospital records from the day after Vetrano’s Aug. 2 murder. He was treated for “a classic boxer’s injury” on his hand, a doctor wrote.
Additional reporting by Laura Italiano