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Mystery Jogger Not a Suspect In Howard Beach Jogger Murder, Police Say

 Phil Vetrano spoke on the radio about a man who used to jog on the same path his daughter was killed.
Phil Vetrano spoke on the radio about a man who used to jog on the same path his daughter was killed.
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DNAinfo/Katie Honan

CIVIC CENTER — After the father of murdered Howard Beach jogger Karina Vetrano went on Curtis Sliwa's radio show Monday and said they were looking to talk to an unnamed man who used to jog the same path where his daughter was killed, the man showed up at the local precinct and was ruled out as a suspect, police said.

NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the man heard Phil Vetrano talking about him on the radio and voluntarily came into the 106th Precinct Monday night to explain why he disappeared from the jogging path.

"He's a 48-year-old man who hurt his knee and stopped jogging," Boyce said after a promotions ceremony at police headquarters in Manhattan on Tuesday. "Nothing more heinous than that."

The man is not a suspect "at all," Boyce added.

The NYPD is still struggling to track down the killer who raped and strangled Vetrano on an evening jog weeks ago, though they've come up with a DNA profile of the suspect and narrowed down two directions he may have fled after the attack.

READ MORE: Murdered Jogger Put Up a Fight Before Being Raped and Beaten, Police Say

Boyce said the DNA profile was developed "from three parts of the investigation: from the victim’s phone, Karina’s phone, from touch DNA from her neck and also from… other parts of her person."

But there have been no nationwide or statewide hits matching the DNA, Boyce said, leading the NYPD to believe the killer is either too young to have served time in jail or hasn't committed any crimes in the last two decades since the DNA database was created.

"That COTUS database that we use for DNA was only formulated in 1998 so that person might have been in jail prior to that," Boyce said.

Tracking down someone who fits either of those criteria is "quite an undertaking," the chief added.

The DNA also didn't match any other DNA that the NYPD has collected from other crimes around the city.

"We take DNA throughout the city on different crimes — burglaries, robberies, things like that... for pattern purposes, to see if they do robbery patterns, burglary patterns," he said. "Nothing's come up."

Asked if the NYPD has had any difficulty accessing Vetrano's phone or computer, Boyce said that "has not been an issue at all" and insisted the NYPD doesn't believe anything in Vetrano's past will lead the NYPD to her killer.

"We don't believe that this has anything to do with Katrina's background at all. We still maintain it’s a random attack," he said. "There's nothing that suggests that anyone in her background would do this to her."

And detectives still haven't determined where the killer entered the park or fled after the attack.

"The video canvasses that we’ve done revealed no one coming out of that park on the [Howard Beach] side," he said. "We believe that individual has gone on to the Belt Parkway, that bicycle path right there, and either went west or east from there, either to South Ozone Park or to East New York, Brooklyn. That’s where we are with the investigation."

READ MORE: NYPD Installs 8 Cameras Where Karina Vetrano Was Murdered in Howard Beach

READ MORE: Rapid Camera Rollout After Howard Beach Murder at Odds With Pace Elsewhere

Unfortunately for detectives, there are no surveillance cameras to pull video from there "because it's such a... dump, if you will," Boyce said.

"It's a landfill. There's no video there at all. It's all commercial locations," he said. "If you keep going west, you’re going to hit Erskine Street and into that shopping mall right there. We’ve gone through that with a fine-tooth comb as well. Anybody arrested for shoplifting, panhandling, whatever the case may be, we’re doing a deep dive on that."