Man accused of killing jogger details final moments of torture
The family of Queens jogger Karina Vetrano broke down in court Monday as they for the first time watched her accused killer detail to cops the tortured final minutes of their daughter’s life.
Cathie Vetrano let out an anguished moan in between sobs as she heard Chanel Lewis calmly confess to the brutal August 2016 beating, in which he broke her daughter’s teeth and kept beating her until she lost consciousness before strangling her.
At one point, the mom brought the foot-long, golden crucifix she routinely totes to court to her face, watching the footage through tears. Her sister Tana Vetrano sat frozen, her teeth bared at Lewis as she cried.
“I was mad, I saw red,” the accused killer tells cops in the video, which was played during a pre-trial hearing Monday to determine whether it’ll be deemed admissible as evidence.
Lewis says he grabbed Vetrano as she ran past himthrough the marshy swamp, adding she clawed at his face as he hit her five times before she was knocked unconscious.
“She didn’t yell. She was finished.”
“I finished her off, I strangled her. She fell into the puddle and drowned,” he says coolly in the footage. “I got up and wiped off the blood. And she was calm, she was in the pool [of water].”
“It was like all the way over [her face],” he says of the puddle, gesturing across his own face.
Incredibly, after telling cops how he “finished her off,” the 21-year-old seemed to think he could pay his way out of murder charges.
“I can straighten out my stuff?” Lewis asks the befuddled prosecutor after he spills his guts during the February 2017 interview. “Well, you’re the DA, right? Where do we go from here? Is there a restitution program or something?”
Before confessing, he’d told Detective Barry Brown, “I want to change my life, I’m sorry for what I did.”
But he insisted he didn’t molest her, even though her jogging shorts had been pulled down. “I didn’t do any of the stuff they said, sexual assault and stuff like that,” he told cops, according to the tape.
He said he then walked home up the bike path, “shaken up,” hoping to get napkins to stop the bleeding from the scratches she’d left on his face.
When asked why he attacked the jogger, Lewis confusingly responded that he killed Vetrano “because a guy moved into my house and the neighborhood.”
Her father, Philip Vetrano, said he was feeling “a lot of anger” and lashed into Lewis’ relatives before he and his family left court in an unmarked police car.
“His family left the room,” he said brusquely. “They couldn’t listen to his confession. We know where the coward got his cowardliness from.
“The truth hurts,” he added. “It’s pathetic. “It’s just so tomorrow they can say their offspring is not guilty.”
Lewis’ family ignored questions.
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