Trial of Carlos Dominguez opens with grisly recounting of Davis stabbing spree
Carlos Reales Dominguez bought the knife used in the deadly 2023 stabbing spree that paralyzed Davis five months before the attacks, Yolo County prosecutors alleged as the former UC Davis student’s murder trial began Monday.
The guilt phase of Dominguez’s two-part, 10-week trial is underway before Yolo Superior Court Judge Samuel McAdam. Dominguez has entered pleas of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity in the knife attacks. He spent nearly four months at Atascadero State Hospital in 2023 after being deemed unfit for trial. He was deemed competent to return to trial and Yolo County custody in January 2024 and has been held without bail in the attacks ever since.
He faces charges of murder and attempted murder along with special allegations of multiple murders and using a deadly weapon to inflict great bodily injury in the third attack. Months before the trial start, prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty if Dominguez was convicted.
McAdam admonished jurors that the guilt phase only tries the question of whether the former UC Davis student is guilty of the crimes against him. Jurors can only consider Dominguez’s state of mind in this phase of the trial, not whether he was sane at the time of the attacks. The second phase of trial will determine whether Dominguez was sane when the acts occurred.
In Tuesday’s opening, Dominguez was dressed in a dark, gray suit and steel blue tie, with his haircut was neatly tapered and kept long at the collar. As the day wore on, he kept a quiet but attentive view of the proceedings.
Dominguez was a struggling freshman at UC Davis that December 2022, Yolo County District Attorney’s prosecutor Frits Van Der Hoek told jurors Monday in the Woodland courtroom. He had lost his job. He and his girlfriend had parted ways, and his roommates were asking about rent. It was Dec. 5 — finals week at UC Davis — when Dominguez began searching Amazon for the Smith & Wesson tactical knife that prosecutors have connected to the killings of 50-year-old David Breaux and 20-year-old Karim Abou Najm; and the attempted killing of Kimberlee Guillory, 64 at the time, in late April and early May 2023.
Dominguez bought the knife a day later, Dec. 6, setting in motion slayings that would shatter a community five months later; killings that Van Der Hoek alleged were “deliberate, willful and premeditated.”
By April, Dominguez was under threat of expulsion, his future at UC Davis in doubt. He began frequenting Davis city parks Central and Sycamore in the days before the brutalized bodies of Breaux, then Najm would be found, Van Der Hoek said in his opening statement.
Van Der Hoek also told the jury of eight women and six men, as well as three alternates, of precision data mined by investigators from Dominguez’s cellphone that tracked Dominguez’s location and when his phone was turned on or shut down. His phone was shut off hours before Breaux’s body was found April 27, 2023, on a Central Park bench. The phone showed Dominguez left his Hawthorne Avenue rental for Sycamore Park two days before Najm was stabbed to death while riding his bicycle the night of April 29, Van Der Hoek alleged.
Breaux was stabbed 31 times, Van Der Hoek said.
“This was not a quick event. This is 31 different stabs ... before he ultimately expired,” Van Der Hoek told jurors.
Two days later, screams from Sycamore Park alerted a physician whose home sits on its border. Najm was stabbed to death in what Van Der Hoek called a “prolonged assault.” The physician tried in vain to save the mortally wounded Najm but could not. He was expected to testify at trial.
Despite the carnage, investigators could find “very little evidence” from Breaux’s killing. Van Der Hoek called it a “very clean crime scene” but for a knife sheath found near Breaux’s body.
The sheath “is going to do a lot of talking,” said Van Der Hoek, who told jurors that evidence will show Dominguez brought the knife to Central Park; that his DNA was found on the sheath; and that he carried the blade in his attacks on Najm and Guillory as she sat in her downtown Davis tent on May 1, 2023.
“It’s going to show it was that knife that did the killing,” Van Der Hoek said.
But Dominguez’s defense attorney, Yolo County deputy public defender Daniel Hutchinson, depicted a man devastated by mental disease — treated, involuntarily at times, by antipsychotic medication since his arrest in the violent attacks. He excelled at sports and in the classroom in high school in Oakland and was “friendly, outgoing and healthy,” Hutchinson told jurors, before the illness that took hold at UC Davis.
Dominguez stared at walls, avoided his roommates, heard voices and believed he was being chased by shape-shifting beings he called “shadow figures,” Hutchinson said.
Hutchinson said Dominguez’s family in Tracy, his roommates and a girlfriend in Davis, all saw the signs of Dominguez’s mental decline before he did.
When he was stopped by police after the days-long rampage, Dominguez was at Sycamore Park, “sitting on a bench and staring into space,” Hutchinson said. “He didn’t believe he stabbed or killed anyone,” Hutchinson said.
Testimony from witnesses began in the afternoon and was expected to continue for several days.
This story was originally published May 5, 2025 at 3:22 PM.
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