Hi everyone, new here and a lifelong Brooklynite. Very sad to hear about Karina. I haven't read through the whole thread here so I'm sorry if I'm repeating anything, but I wanted to run some thoughts I've had by you all:
1. The brutality and intimacy of strangling/beating/raping someone else suggests to me that it was not a vagrant or a transient who attacked KV, even if vagrants or transients tend to hang out in that area. The sheer aggression points to someone who she knew or who felt they knew her--an important distinction if you believe that e.g. a stalker who knew her from a place like her gym (assuming she went to one because she was in such good shape) or workplace OR who had somehow found and read her blog.
2. On that last point: her Instagram is private, but she has a lot of followers. Since it is doubtful that she has acquired more posthumously unless someone else has access to it and for some reason has been accepting new followers, perhaps it was someone she didn't know but whose request to follow she had accepted along with thousands of others. She was pretty active on IG, too--800+ posts. As for her personal website, people who pay for a domain name (which she did) tend to advertise that new website on other social media of theirs, so if the person who killed her followed her on Instagram, they may have read a self-advertising post directing them to her new blog.
3. The majority of the comments on her blog are flattery from men, apparent strangers to whom she responds very kindly and cheerfully. A lot of the posts involve her talking in first person to someone referred to as "you," which could be appealing to a certain kind of reader who's desperate for some semblance of intimacy with a woman, whether she knows it and reciprocates or not.
4. The media is reporting (as if to blame her for her death) that her father had cautioned her against running on this path alone. Women, especially women in New York, are generally not going to ignore a) that kind of advice from a parent and b) their intuition. Few women native to New York would want to spend the entirety of their run in an isolated place. Though I'd like to see a map to bolster this theory, perhaps she was running elsewhere but encountered someone/something she didn't like on her real route and diverted to the fire lane in an attempt to avoid it/them. If this is the case, eventually she got far enough away (or else the person appeared to leave) that she felt safe enough to stop and text a friend (please correct me if I'm wrong; I read that she was messaging someone when she was assaulted), but the person attacked her when standing still.
Also, the place she was found was accessible from the Belt Parkway--was it near a part of the Belt with a shoulder? There's a lot of construction going on at the moment, so if there is normally a shoulder nearby, it might be closed off. But if not, perhaps the person came in a car that they left on the shoulder or else on the street nearby. Again, a map would be very helpful here. I'm not at all familiar with the geography of Howard Beach and I don't know the exact spot where she was found.