Carlos Dominguez, suspect in 2023 Davis stabbing spree, testifies at murder trial
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- Carlos Dominguez testified he suffers from schizophrenia, central to his defense.
- The trial examines whether Dominguez was legally sane during the 2023 stabbings.
- The former UC Davis student described sexual assault as child in El Salvador.
Carlos Reales Dominguez spoke clearly and directly to Yolo jurors of the life he lived before the violence that led him to a courtroom’s witness box Monday morning.
Dominguez, 22, has pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity to murder and attempted murder in the serial stabbing attacks that killed two Davis men at the city’s Sycamore and Central parks and wounded an unhoused woman in April and May 2023.
In a full morning on the stand at his murder trial in Yolo Superior Court in Woodland, the former UC Davis student said he understands now that he has a mental illness — the diagnosed schizophrenia at the heart of his defense — discovered while confined in Atascadero State Hospital.
“Do you have a mental illness?” defense attorney Daniel Hutchinson asked. “Yes,” Dominguez answered.
“What illness?”
“Schizophrenia,” Dominguez replied.
He takes daily medication, the antipsychotic Zyprexa, or olanzapine, used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, he testified.
He also revealed childhood traumas, including his sexual abuse by a family maid while a child living with his grandparents in El Salvador: “She told me she had something to show me,” Dominguez recounted. “I didn’t like being around her after.”
His journey to the U.S. from El Salvador led to a “cell with iron bars,” in a Texas detention center before a foster home and, finally, the ride with an uncle to the Bay Area to reunite with his mother and father in Oakland.
His parents’ marriage was tumultuous, punctuated at times by heavy drinking and loud arguments, but he was close to his younger siblings and earned A’s and B’s at his Oakland high school. The grades were strong enough that he set his sights on Stanford University and applied to a number of University of California schools including UC Davis.
Dominguez would find friends and a girlfriend at college, but there were also troubling signs.
He began to see “shadow figures,” faceless images with devil’s horns under his computer desk; “totem” figures in the corners of rooms; dreams where the same shadow figure sat atop his chest, Dominguez testified.
The voices came later, and more frequently, at the Hawthorne Avenue home Dominguez shared with his roommates, he testified.
“I remember hearing whispers. I remember hearing loud knocks and bangs,” he testified. “I started to feel paranoid. My focus would be on the loud bangs and voices.”
He said music chased away the whispers. So did walks to Sycamore Park.
Dominguez’s testimony opened the fifth week of what’s expected to be a 10-week first phase of the trial. The trial was expected to last through July in Judge Samuel McAdam’s court.
The former UC Davis student was arrested seven days after the first of three knife attacks in the college town in 2023 that killed David Henry Breaux, 50, known better as the city’s “Compassion Guy” for his kind and generous nature. He was found dead with multiple stab wounds April 27 in the city’s Central Park.
Karim Abou Najm, the 20-year-old son of a university professor who was weeks away from graduating from UC Davis, was killed on the night of April 29 when he was attacked as he walked through Sycamore Park.
A woman, Kimberlee Guillory, then 64, was nearly killed May 1 when she was stabbed repeatedly through the tent where she slept near Second and L streets.
Two days later, Davis police arrested Dominguez in connection with the attacks. Prosecutors spent the better part of last week detailing the interrogation by police, including the viewing of 5½ hours of video with detectives and a despondent Dominguez, who had been kicked of UCD days before for failing grades.
A jury of eight women and six men will determine whether Dominguez was sane during the days-long rampage and decide whether he is guilty or innocent of crimes. Yolo County District Attorney’s prosecutors decided not to pursue the death penalty in the slayings.
Days of testimony at Dominguez’s 2023 competency trial, months after the knife rampage, told of a young man in the grips of mental decline. Roommates and a former girlfriend were among those who took the stand during the trial last month to say Dominguez heard voices, stopped talking to his roommates and stared at the walls before the violent attacks.
One expert testified that Dominguez was a “textbook example of schizophrenia.” In Yolo County custody, he refused meals for days at a time. In the courtroom, a stringy mop of hair occluded his face as he sat motionless beside defense counsel and Yolo County Deputy Public Defender Daniel Hutchinson.
Superior Court Judge Samuel McAdam ultimately ordered Dominguez to Atascadero to restore competency and fitness for trial before McAdam deemed him fit for trial in January 2024.
Yolo County Deputy District Attorney Frits Van Der Hoek and prosecutors were expected to cross-examine Dominguez as early as Tuesday afternoon.
This story was originally published June 2, 2025 at 2:56 PM.
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