Lax checks and union apathy kept the accused jogger killer in NYC kids’ classrooms

· New York Post

In September and October, 10 adults at Brooklyn’s PS 200 warned about paraprofessional Sayed Mohassib’s erratic behavior.

They flagged his blank stares, the gun charm he wore around his neck and disturbing social-media posts of his chest tattoo naming, among other figures, Allah and the antichrist.

Each time, The Post reported, school administrators and union officials brushed off the complaining colleagues, telling some to stop being “racist.”

On Tuesday, a Brooklyn grand jury indicted Mohassib on a second-degree murder charge in the random killing of jogger Katie Suarez at the Shore Parkway Greenway.

Every parent in the city should be asking: If this is who DOE lets sit beside special-needs kids all day, who else is in the classroom?

Mohassib’s colleagues weren’t the first to see trouble: NYPD and the US Marines spotted it years earlier.

In 2022, Mohassib left his hourly support job at the DOE to join the NYPD. 

After just six weeks he left the force for the Marines — which quickly discharged him for being psychologically unfit.

A disheveled Mohassib sought NYPD reinstatement, but cops rejected him — and sent him to Bellevue Hospital.

Yet DOE re-hired him as a substitute para for the 2023–24 school year, then re-approved him to work with children every year since.

So how did Mohassib, rejected by one city agency with a history of psychological problems and hospitalization, end up working with children at another city agency?

It starts with a school principal.

To become a substitute paraprofessional, you must first be nominated by a principal who wants to hire you.

An assessment, training and a background check follow — but getting the job can be a matter of who you know.

Mohassib had family ties inside the system: His sister is also a para at PS 200, Post sources say, and his aunt is an assistant principal at another school.

City rules bar DOE employees from helping a relative get hired — but that rule is hard to enforce.

And the DOE doesn’t disclose who, if anyone, recommends a substitute-para candidate to the nominating principal.

Still, DOE’s hiring policy lets investigators review an applicant’s past jobs and military record, not just criminal history.

They could have looked into his troubled stints with NYPD and the Marines.

Did anyone at DOE bother to ask about those incidents?

Worse, the chances to assess him didn’t end when he returned to DOE.

Substitute paraprofessionals must renew their eligibility every year.

They have to maintain a positive record in the schools where they work and remain in good standing with DOE’s Office of Personnel Investigations.

But no one is required to evaluate them.

Even though substitute paras often work with the system’s most vulnerable children, DOE leaves it to individual schools to raise flags.

A principal can file a “Do Not Use” report and ban a substitute from the building. 

The DOE’s own rules say what should have happened: Any school incident that may affect the safety of students or staff must be logged in the department’s incident system within one school day.

Yet despite colleagues’ complaints, Mohassib kept working with children.

Here’s the latest on Katie Suarez, the NYC jogger who was stabbed during a run:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised “a full review of the entire process of background and hiring at large.”

That must include the role of the United Federation of Teachers, which represents substitute paras.

The UFT can’t fire anyone, but its chapter leader sits on every school’s safety committee.

If staff kept raising alarms about Mohassib, the chapter leader could have put it on record there, brought it to the union’s district representative or reported it to the city’s special investigator for schools.

Instead, the UFT devotes its energy to job protections and pay.

In 2018, it won limits on when paraprofessionals under investigation can be suspended without pay, shielding them from accountability.

Through collective bargaining, the union also negotiates what substitutes earn — and paras come second, making far less money than teachers.

Low base pay makes it harder to attract and keep qualified paras, while weak oversight makes it harder to remove unfit ones.

Progressives have long argued that a cop with a problematic record shouldn’t be able to leave the NYPD and pick up a badge elsewhere in the state.

Why should that principle stop at police?

If public workers have a record of misconduct or psychological unfitness, why should the school system or another agency take them in?

Mohassib’s case shows the cost of shuffling problem workers around.

And in public schools, the risks fall on children.

No substitute para should be renewed without a formal evaluation from a principal or other qualified school official.

Parents send their children to school trusting that someone is watching the adults in the building.

At PS 200, coworkers were speaking up, but they were brushed off.

DOE owes them, and parents, answers.

Jennifer Weber is a fellow at Manhattan Institute, where John Ketcham is director of cities.