Accused Davis killer showed bizarre, isolated behavior before stabbings, roommates testify
The last time Sidney Slesicki saw Carlos Reales Dominguez was at the Davis home the roommates once shared. The crisis gripping Davis was at an apex that May day, and Slesicki greeted his roommate at the driveway with a word of warning.
It was May 3. Two men were already dead, found stabbed to death in separate city parks; a third woman, stabbed repeatedly, survived and was recovering at a nearby hospital.
“I saw Carlos come out of the house. I said, ‘Hey, be careful out there. There was another stabbing,’” Slesicki said Wednesday. Reales Dominguez’s reaction still troubles him.
“He didn’t acknowledge — he was kind of staring out into dead space,” Slesicki continued. “He walked past me. He didn’t even look at me. He went into the street, made a super sharp turn into the roadway and walked down the middle of West Eighth Street.”
It would be the last time Slesicki saw Reales Dominguez until his view of a disheveled, shackled Reales Dominguez from a courtroom’s witness stand Wednesday morning.
Testimony continued Wednesday in Yolo Superior Court in Woodland, in Reales Dominguez’s competency trial to determine whether the 20-year-old former UC Davis student and now double-murder suspect is mentally fit to stand trial.
Yolo County deputy public defender Daniel Hutchinson called a steady stream of defense witnesses — Reales Dominguez’s former roommates including Slesicki, as well as coworkers — to testify Tuesday and again Wednesday.
Doctors and experts, including Amy Gutierrez, one of two mental health professionals monitoring Reales Dominguez at Yolo County Jail, later testified. Reales Dominguez has been confined to the jail’s infirmary since his May 4 booking, Gutierrez said.
Reales Dominguez is in custody under a suicide watch. Yolo County jailers routinely place inmates charged and held for the first time on serious charges on the watch list, Guiterrez said. He is housed alone.
He denies experiencing depression or entertaining suicidal thoughts but has refused food for days at a time, enough times that jailers classified the acts as “hunger strikes,” Gutierrez testified.
“He did have periods of hunger strikes. We were seriously concerned about his ability to care for himself while in custody,” she said.
Guitierrez testified those concerns reached a peak in May when, with his vital signs declining and placed on a rare in-custody mental health hold, Reales Dominguez was briefly transferred to a local hospital for care.
Unlike criminal proceedings, the defense carries the burden of proof at a competency trial. If jurors decide that Reales Dominguez is not fit for trial, criminal proceedings will remain suspended.
Hutchinson expects to call yet more witnesses in the coming days.
‘Something needed to be done’
Jurors heard descriptions of Reales Dominguez’s increasingly isolated, withdrawn and bizarre behavior in the weeks and months before the knife attacks that killed 50-year-old David Breaux and 20-year-old graduating UC Davis student Karim Abou Najm. A third attack seriously wounded Kimberlee Guillory, 64, as she slept in her Davis encampment.
Reales Dominguez’s roommates testified Wednesday to an April meeting in their home to try to discuss his behavior, selecting a roommate to lead the discussion and find their friend help.
“It was something to express our concerns about him being mentally ill,” former roommate Phillip Han testified. “We shared our personal observations that something needed to be done. We were trying to convince him to get checked out, to talk to someone, to open up.”
Han said he later talked to Reales Dominguez alone. “I told him that therapy for UC Davis students on campus is free; if you want to open up to me ... (but) he kind of brushed it off and it never came up after that. It just sort of died.”
But Reales Dominguez’s relationship with his roommates had been withering for months, his former roommates testified.
Music had once bonded fledgling musicians Slesicki and Reales Dominguez. But Slesicki took an emotional pause from the stand as he recalled Reales Dominguez’s shift into silence last November.
“This is just really tough for me,” Slesicki told Yolo Superior Court Judge Samuel McAdam from the stand.
At home, his route was a “beeline,” in Slesicki’s words, from bedroom to kitchen, nearly marched in an erect gait, arms at his sides.
“Later, toward the incident, he wouldn’t even look at us,” Slesicki said. “There was little to no interaction. He’d just walk past me like I wasn’t alive.”
This story was originally published July 26, 2023 at 2:37 PM.
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