NEW YORK – After Richard Rojas was kicked out of the Navy, he began sharing troubling thoughts running through his head: that cars were following him, planes were spraying him with chemicals, that his food was poisoned.
An uncle, Ramón Reyes, said Rojas offered a self-diagnosis: “You know I’m crazy. And they’re not giving me the help I need.”
If Rojas was correct about his mental condition, he is at the crux of a trial in New York, where he hit a sidewalk in his car in 2017 and struck pedestrians in Times Square.
A teenage tourist from Michigan was killed in front of her mother in the attack. More than 20 other people were injured.
Rojas, 31, faces murder, assault and other charges in a trial taking place in the shadow of mass shootings across the country and the political debate in which gun control opponents have tried to blame the violence to failures in mental health care.
Early on, State Judge Daniel Conviser raised the possibility of a paradoxical outcome in Rojas’s case: Jurors could find Rojas guilty and, at the same time, decide that he “lacked responsibility for mental illness or defect.” The judge said the finding would qualify him for indefinite “involuntary mental compromise” rather than a lengthy prison term.
Prosecutors admit that Rojas had some mental problems and that the motive for the attack is unclear. But they also argue that the defendant had led a mostly normal life — serving in the military, getting a real estate license, making friends — and that he does not meet the standard of insanity necessary to release him from liability. They say he had several chances to stop his car on a busy day in Times Square, but he mercilessly drove on until he crashed.
“It was impossible for him not to know exactly what was going on,” prosecutor Alfred Peterson told the jury.
A prosecution case that ended late last month focused largely on harrowing accounts of victims who survived a horrific incident in Times Square. With the trial over, the defense has been trying to counter in recent days by delving into Rojas’s troubled past to try to convince the jury that he was too sick to know what he was doing.
Family members, including Reyes, have described the wave of paranoia from the witness stand.
A key defense witness has been Ziv Cohen, a psychiatrist on the faculty of Weill Cornell Medical College and Columbia University, who diagnosed Rojas as schizophrenic. Unlike more common psychological disorders, schizophrenia is “a brain disease, so it’s a chemical imbalance in the brain” that made Rojas prone to hallucinations, Cohen testified.
While in the Navy, Rojas began hearing voices, the doctor said. In particular, he was listening to “James,” a “supernatural, God-like figure who had special information,” he testified.
On the day of the hit-and-run, Rojas was told by his imaginary guide that he needed to crash his car into the “spirits” around him to send them to heaven and free Rojas “from the torture he is experiencing as part of his psychosis,” he testified.
“At a certain point, the psychosis becomes so severe that you can no longer control your behavior,” he said.
Relatives testified to their despair as they watched Rojas disintegrate after he was discharged from the Navy in 2014, the result of a court-martial stemming from an arrest for beating a taxi driver.
One brother, Wilmer Veras, took the witness stand to recall how a delusional Rojas was obsessed with keeping duct tape over his phone and laptop camera lens in case he was being spied on. When he was in the world, he “looked for things that weren’t there” and “said people followed him.” He even accused Veras of “doing voodoo to him.”
At that point, “I told him that I really needed help; that he was really losing it,” Veras said.
The uncle, Ramón Reyes, recounted a phone call a few days before the Times Square accident in which Rojas asked for help. Reyes told him to stop by his house the next day to take him to the doctor, but he “never showed up,” he said.
When a relative contacted Reyes saying he saw a TV report about an arrest that had pictures of someone who looked like Rojas, the uncle desperately started calling his nephew hoping it wasn’t him, he testified. They asked the uncle if Rojas ever answered.
“No,” the witness replied, and then cried.
THE DEADLY CRASH OF 2017 AT TIMES SQUARE
Prosecutors say Rojas drove his car from the Bronx, where he lived with his mother, through Times Square on May 18, 2017, then made a U-turn, drove his car onto a sidewalk and back up the sidewalk. three blocks before he crashed his car into the protective barriers.
Photographers took wild-eyed pictures of Rojas after he got out of the wrecked car and ran down the street waving his arms. PCP, or phencyclidine, can cause users to become delusional, violent or suicidal, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.
DRIVER SEEKING TO “KILL THEM ALL”
According to prosecutors, Rojas said he wanted to “kill them all.”
Rojas pleaded not guilty at an arraignment in 2017 and has since been incarcerated at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island prison complex. His attorney said at the time that it was a “terrible thing that happened” in Times Square.
“But how we handle this type of case will determine how civilized we are as a society,” said defense attorney Enrico DeMarco.
ABOUT SUSPECT RICHARD ROJAS
Richard Rojas, of Dominican descent, had several previous criminal cases that paint a picture of a troubled man. Days before the Times Square incident, he pleaded guilty to one count of stalking in the Bronx for pulling a knife on a notary at his home and accusing the person of trying to steal his identity.
He also had two prior drunk driving cases.
Rojas enlisted in the Navy in 2011 and served part of 2012 aboard the USS Carney, a destroyer. Rojas spent his final months in the Navy at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida.
In 2012, he was arrested and accused of punching a taxi driver who he said had disrespected him by trying to overcharge him, according to the arrest report. The arresting officer said Rojas yelled, “My life is over!” while he was detained. After his arrest, Rojas told the officer that he was going to kill every police officer and MP he could see after his release from jail, according to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office report.
Alan Ceballos, a lawyer who represented Rojas in that case, said the state charges were dropped after the military stepped in to take jurisdiction over the criminal case. Navy records show that in 2013 Rojas spent two months in a naval prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was discharged in 2014 as a result of a special court-martial, a Navy official said.
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