Richard Rojas did not speak much about his three years in a Navy uniform, but when he returned to the Bronx from a naval base in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2014, he was a different man.
His mind was clouded with conspiracy theories. His dreams of opening his own clothing business had wilted. He lashed out at friends who challenged him; some thought his grasp of reality had slipped and that he needed psychiatric help.
During a string of arrests in recent years, Mr. Rojas once threatened to kill police officers, and last week he accused a notary of trying to steal his identity and grabbed his neck, the authorities said. But despite his mounting aggression and mental health issues that began in childhood, friends and the authorities said, he never sought or received help, instead burrowing deeper into his paranoia and drinking or smoking marijuana.
On Thursday, Mr. Rojas, 26, was behind the wheel of a car that a friend said had been outfitted with a speeding detection system after a previous drunken-driving arrest. Under a wall of billboards and bright advertisements in Times Square, he waited for traffic to pass and then made an abrupt U-turn before accelerating and plowing through three and a half blocks of sidewalk crowds, killing an 18-year-old woman, Alyssa Elsman, and hurting 20 other people, the police said.
“I wanted to kill them,” he told a traffic safety officer after crashing his Honda Accord, according to a criminal complaint filed in court on Friday.
Shortly after noon on Friday, Mr. Rojas appeared in Criminal Court in Manhattan and was formally charged with murder and 20 counts of attempted murder, as his family members looked on solemnly from a back row. An assistant district attorney, Harrison Schweiloch, said Mr. Rojas had gone on a “murderous rampage” to kill as many people as possible and afterward proclaimed that the police should have shot him.
Mr. Rojas also told a police officer that he had smoked marijuana laced with PCP, or angel dust, a dangerous drug linked to temporary psychosis and violent behavior, the criminal complaint says.
Judge Tamiko Amaker ordered Mr. Rojas, his head down and his hands cuffed behind him, to be jailed to await trial.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, during an interview on WNYC on Friday morning, said Mr. Rojas’s family members had told the authorities that he had “demonstrated mental health issues going back to childhood that, like so many other such situations in our society, went unaddressed, even during the time he was in the U.S. military.”
Path of the Car
Map showing where a vehicle struck pedestrians in Times Square. Red dots represent the locations of victims that could be observed in photographs.
N
W. 43 ST.
W. 44 ST.
W. 45 ST.
Broadway
W. 42 ST.
2
Car travels on the sidewalk
striking people until ...
3
7th Ave.
... it crashes and
comes to a stop.
1
Driver makes
a U-turn.
Broadway
Satellite Image via Google Earth
A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was not complete, said Mr. Rojas had reported hearing voices and having hallucinations. During the execution of a search warrant on Thursday at the apartment where Mr. Rojas lived with his mother, investigators discovered Scientology books he kept there. Another law enforcement official said he had made some statements about a day of reckoning.
He had no traffic incidents between leaving his Bronx apartment at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday and speeding onto the Times Square sidewalk around 11:54 a.m., Assistant Chief William Aubry, the commander of Manhattan South detectives, said at a news conference on Friday. He drove under sidewalk scaffolding, his car’s side-view mirrors and license plates falling off, as pedestrians were thrown atop his car and dragged underneath it.
Three of those injured remained in critical condition on Friday, including a 38-year-old woman from Canada who was in very critical condition, Chief Aubry said. Ms. Elsman’s 13-year-old sister was also being treated for a collapsed lung and a broken pelvis, he said.
Mr. Rojas grew up on Walton Avenue in the Mount Eden section of the Bronx, about a mile and a half north of Yankee Stadium. With a friend, Hansel Guerrero, who lived in the same building, Mr. Rojas rode around on his bicycle and hung out at auto shops, working on people’s cars. He spoke of wanting to start a clothing line, graduate from college and have his own apartment in New York.
After taking a few college courses, Mr. Guerrero said, Mr. Rojas enlisted in the Navy in 2011. He was eager to leave the Bronx.
“He wanted really badly to be in the Navy,” Mr. Guerrero, 26, said. “To him it was a journey out of New York life. He was exploring.”
“To him, it was very exciting,” Mr. Guerrero said.
About a month after Mr. Rojas returned to Jacksonville, in September 2012, he was arrested just outside Naval Station Mayport and charged with battery and resisting an officer. He had told a cabdriver to follow him into the barracks where he was going to get money to pay the driver, but instead Mr. Rojas attacked him, according to an arrest report. A police officer caught him, with a torn shirt and a cut on his hand, after he drove out of the base. Mr. Rojas had been drinking, the report said.
“My life is over,” he yelled, according to the arrest report. The report said that Mr. Rojas had also threatened “to kill all police and military police he might see after he is released from jail.”
The military eventually took over prosecution of the case from the local prosecutor, said the lawyer who represented Mr. Rojas in the case, M. Alan Ceballos. The disposition of the case was not clear.
One Dead as Car Hits Pedestrians in Times Square
One person was killed and at least 22 were injured when a car struck pedestrians in New York’s Times Square. The driver of the car has been taken into custody.
By MALACHY BROWNE, AINARA TIEFENTHÄLER and NEETI UPADHYE on May 18, 2017.Photo by Mary Altaffer/Associated Press. Watch in Times Video »
In May 2014, he left the Navy, records indicate. Navy officials would not disclose the circumstances of his departure, but Mr. Guerrero said Mr. Rojas told him that he had been dishonorably discharged. He had attained the rank of electrician’s mate fireman apprentice.
He began to express scorn for a government he felt had held him back and blocked his progress, Mr. Guerrero said. When Mr. Rojas returned to the Bronx apartment where his mother lived, he started drinking and grew increasingly anxious and isolated, said Harrison Ramos, 30, though other friends said that Mr. Rojas had never had a drinking problem.
“People go and they serve their country and they come back crazy and nobody helps them,” said Mr. Ramos, who said he went to William H. Taft High School with Mr. Rojas. Mr. Ramos said his friend had written conspiratorial posts online. “He seemed a little lost in the world,” he said.
An acquaintance, who declined to give his name, said he was once fixing his car after the check engine light came on, and Mr. Rojas had walked over to chat. The acquaintance said Mr. Rojas had told him that he could get the light to turn off by driving more than 100 miles per hour.
Mr. Guerrero said Mr. Rojas came to see routine government interactions as part of a plan to control him. He railed against taxes, parking tickets and police stops. He came to see his Navy training as a deception that harmed recruits, though he was rarely specific or trusting enough of his companions to explain what he meant.
“He was angry,” Mr. Guerrero said. “It was kind of hard to talk to him because it was like, if you go against him he’d see you as an enemy.”
The last time he spoke to Mr. Rojas was earlier this year, when Mr. Rojas complained that police officers judged people by their age and their skin color. “He felt like he was picked on,” Mr. Guerrero said.
His legal troubles piled up. Mr. Rojas was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated in Manhattan in April 2015. The officer who stopped him said Mr. Rojas had watery and bloodshot eyes, slurred speech, unsteady feet and the smell of alcohol on his breath, according to a criminal complaint. It was his second drunken-driving charge in New York; the other was in 2008 in Queens. After the Manhattan episode, he pleaded guilty to an infraction and was ordered to complete a drunken-driving prevention program. His license was suspended for 90 days, and he was fined $500.
A week ago, on May 11, after a man came to his mother’s apartment to notarize documents for him, Mr. Rojas grabbed the man’s neck, threatened him with a knife and said, “You’re trying to steal my identity,” according to a criminal complaint. He was charged with menacing and criminal possession of a weapon. On May 12, he pleaded guilty to harassment and was given a conditional discharge.
Another friend, Alex Ayala, 35, said he saw Mr. Rojas around that same time at the corner of Walton and East Mount Eden Avenues, where his childhood friends used to hang out. Mr. Rojas did not betray any troubles. “He was sitting on the old block,” Mr. Ayala said.
Comments
Post a Comment