The madman accused of fatally bludgeoning 4 homeless males in Manhattan heard voices urging him to “kill 40 individuals” to “save his personal life” — inflicting his 2019 killing spree, his lawyer argued at trial Tuesday.
Attorneys for Randy Santos, 31 — who allegedly went on a predawn homicide spree brutally bashing the skulls of 4 sleeping males in Chinatown with a scavenged metallic bar on Oct. 5, 2019 — declare the sicko was off his schizophrenia remedy when voices instructed him to kill or be killed.
“It was actual to Randy,” Santos’s lawyer Marnie Zien of the Authorized Support Society mentioned throughout opening statements in Manhattan Supreme Courtroom.
“He wanted the voices to cease; he wanted to avoid wasting his life and didn’t see one other means out due to the schizophrenia.”
Santos, who has been out and in of psychiatric wards for the reason that alleged killings, is planning a psychiatric protection, his lawyer mentioned — by admitting to the murders however proving he’s not criminally accountable because of his “disoriented diseased thoughts.”
“The protection doesn’t dispute what occurred on this case,” Zien mentioned as Santos sat with one headphone earbud off his head. “We dispute what was in his thoughts on the time of the crime.”
The trial comes practically seven years after the brutish beatdowns — the place prosecutors declare that he randomly assaulted six homeless males in Chelsea and Chinatown.
The jury heard a play-by-play from Manhattan Assistant District lawyer Alfred Peterson of every alleged Santos assault — together with promising video of when he took a 4-foot-long metallic bar and bashed the heads of the sleeping homeless males.
“A stick in a single occasion, a psychological bar in one other, instantly down in a single place on their physique – their head,” Peterson mentioned in court docket.
Prosecutors declare that Santos’ crime spree began in September 2019 when he went after Kyle Leonard, a homeless man, with a stick close to twelfth Avenue in Chelsea.
The sufferer someway survived the assault, Peterson mentioned, calling the primary crime a “trial run” earlier than Santos’ “huge day” on Oct. 9 when he allegedly approached his first victims, two males sprawled asleep subsequent to one another on cardboard at Bowery and Doyers streets simply earlier than 2 a.m.
After smashing the pair within the heads with the metallic bar, Santos left them for lifeless earlier than he circled again and stalked out extra victims, in accordance with cops.
Santos returned to the scene, Peterson mentioned, as a result of he feared that he “didn’t full the job” — when he then determined to journey to East Broadway the place he attacked three extra sleeping males.
4 victims — Nazario Vasquez Villegas, Chuen Kwok, Anthony Manson and Florencio Moran Camano — died from the heinous assaults whereas one miraculously survived.
“(He) knew precisely what he was doing and precisely the results of what he was doing and that he was killing these males,” Peterson added.
Santos, who was 24 on the time of the alleged brutality, had a historical past of violent, random assaults earlier than the killing spree, in accordance with cops.
He faces life in jail with out parole if convicted of first-degree homicide.
The trial is anticipated to final two weeks.
