It was just before 2 a.m. on an October Saturday in 2019 when a man bludgeoned to death four homeless men with a 15-pound metal bar in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
The attacks unfolded in a span of minutes, said Alfred Peterson, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, on Tuesday during the first day of the murder trial. The accused attacker, Randy Rodriguez Santos, was also homeless at the time and appeared to be unraveling mentally. A fifth man barely escaped alive.
On Tuesday, more than six years after the attacks, Mr. Santos, 31, sat at the defense table with his hair pulled back, wearing a white button down shirt. He listened to an interpreter through over-ear headphones as prosecutors with the Manhattan district attorney’s office began laying out the case against him. Mr. Santos faces four counts of murder in the first degree, and if convicted on the highest charges, he could serve a sentence of life in prison without parole. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Mr. Peterson told jurors that Mr. Santos went on a “trial run” of the killings a week before in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, where he attacked a sleeping man with a stick. However, people intervened and chased him away, according to Mr. Peterson. The man did not die.
About a week later, Mr. Santos went on another attack, but this time he had gone on “the hunt” for a weapon, Mr. Peterson said. With a metal bar in hand, he found the sleeping men and started delivering blows to their heads, Mr. Peterson said, at one point pausing when he saw a person walking by.
“The blows are repeated and they are carefully directed at one spot on the body of these three men,” he said. “At the skull.”
As Mr. Peterson spoke, a juror in the first row looked at the floor, at times wincing. At one point, he appeared to be looking at Mr. Santos with a furrowed brow.
The men who were killed, whose ages ranged from their late 30s to their 80s, were Anthony L. Manson, Nazario A. Vazquez Villegas, Chuen Kwok and Florencio Moran Camano.
The news of the killings left the city’s homeless population on edge, and the circumstances highlighted the vulnerability of the city’s unhoused and how people can fall through the cracks of city agencies, especially when grappling with mental illness. In the years since, episode after episode of violence and each killing have reignited concerns over the continued precariousness of safety for many homeless people in the city.
Mr. Santos’s case seemed to embody all of those concerns.
According to people who knew Mr. Santos in 2019, the attacks came after years of erratic and violent behavior. Mr. Santos, who was 24 at the time, moved from the Dominican Republic to New York City with his mother about five years before. After moving, his aunt told The New York Times that he became depressed and began using illicit drugs, which made him paranoid and fractured his stability.
After arriving in New York City, Mr. Santos had been arrested for assault six times. Each time he was jailed and released, sometimes because victims would not cooperate with law enforcement. He had been in and out of shelters and in an abandoned building in his mother’s neighborhood in the Bronx. In the months before the killings, his mental decline had begun to worry those who knew him.
In an interview after his arrest, Mr. Santos claimed that he could not remember what had happened that night. He recalled making his way downtown from an abandoned building in the Bronx, where he had been staying, but the rest of the night was a blur.
On Tuesday, Mr. Santos’s lawyer, Marnie Leigh Zien, addressed Mr. Santos’s psychiatric history and history of violence. At the time, Mr. Santos, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, heard voices, she said and “lacked the substantial capacity to know and appreciate” that his actions were morally wrong. In his “distorted, diseased mind,” Mr. Santos believed that he had to kill 40 people to save his own life, Ms. Zien said.
“It’s incomprehensible, but it was real to Randy,” she said, adding, “he didn’t see another way out because of his schizophrenia.”
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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