Lawyer says schizophrenia fueled accused Davis killer. ‘Devil was talking to him,’ ex testifies
Carlos Reales Dominguez is severely mentally ill, his defense attorney told jurors Tuesday in Woodland. He heard voices, lost weight and withdrew from friends, his former girlfriend told those same jurors from the witness stand.
“He said the devil was talking to him in his dreams. There were multiple occasions where he’d say that,” Caley Gallardo, his former girlfriend, testified. Gallardo thought he had a mental illness but said Reales Dominguez “was not very receptive to that at all.”
As family members of the two men the 20-year-old former UC Davis sophomore is accused of killing at knifepoint looked on, Reales Dominguez’s defense depicted a man plunging ever deeper into mental crisis, a deadly dive they say has left him accused of two murders and a bloody attempt at a third killing.
The first day of Reales Dominguez’s competency hearing began Tuesday in Yolo Superior Court. His guilt or innocence is not in question, Yolo Superior Court Samuel McAdam repeatedly admonished. The question, more than two months after the knife rampage that stunned Davis this spring, is whether Reales Dominguez is mentally fit to stand trial.
No, Yolo County deputy public defender Daniel Hutchinson said in his opening statement. The presumed diagnosis: schizophrenia.
“Carlos Dominguez is severely mentally ill. ... The evidence will show that Carlos Dominguez has schizophrenia — symptoms that take away what he once had,” Hutchinson said.
As a shackled Reales Dominguez sat silently at the defendant’s table, Hutchinson did not mention the deadly Davis attacks but depicted the former student’s deterioration from solidly built, social, athletic student to the unshaven, unwashed, incoherent inmate forced to take antipsychotic medication now in Yolo County custody.
“He is physically and mentally deteriorating every day,” Hutchinson said.
Yolo prosecutor Chris Van de Hoek was not convinced.
“The starting line is competence,” Van de Hoek said. Reales Dominguez is “toying with the system,” he said, duping his doctors and therapists and capable of “making decisions based on what is going on around him.”
Van de Hoek also questioned what he characterized as defense experts’ view of Reales Dominguez’s mental state.
“He’s incompetent to stand trial, but competent to stand as his own attorney. He’s incompetent to stand trial, but competent to make decisions about his medication.”
But several people, including Reales Dominguez’s roommates and a coworker at a Davis Jack in the Box restaurant, spoke to his increasingly withdrawn and bizarre behavior, including episodes at the Davis eatery during which he would stare at its walls for long stretches.
UC Davis student and former friend and roommate, Nathan Riego De Dios, recalled watching Reales Dominguez appearing to talk to himself in the kitchen of the apartment they shared. Riego De Dios said he was disturbed by what he witnessed.
“I was freaked out by it. I’ve never seen that before,” he testified Tuesday. Riego De Dios said he never asked Reales Dominguez about it. “I was just kind of scared.”
Reales Dominguez allegedly stabbed to death 50-year-old Davis resident David Breaux and 20-year-old UC Davis student Karim Abou Najm at city parks, then stabbed and seriously injured 64-year-old unhoused woman Kimberlee Guillory as she slept in a Davis encampment.
The defendant faces two counts of murder and one of attempted murder in the attacks, which took place in late April and early May before police arrested Reales Dominguez on May 4.
This story was originally published July 25, 2023 at 2:21 PM.
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