Trial starts for driver whose car hit N.Y. tourists
NEW YORK — The man behind the wheel of the car that barreled through crowds of pedestrians in New York City’s Times Square, killing a woman and injuring 22 other people, went on trial Monday after various delays over five years, including pandemicinduced court shutdowns.
In an opening statement, prosecutor Alfred Peterson told a Manhattan jury that Richard Rojas was well aware of the carnage he was causing by plowing through helpless tourists in 2017 visiting the popular destination known as “the crossroads of the world.“
It was “impossible for him not to know exactly what was happening,” Peterson said. “But he didn’t stop.”
After Rojas finally crashed his car, his first words to a traffic agent were, “I wanted to kill them all,” the prosecutor added.
Defense attorney Enrico DeMarco said in his opening that Rojas has a history of mental illness that made him unable to understand the consequences of his actions that day.
“This a case about a 26year-old who lost his mind,” DeMarco said.
Rojas’ trial, in state court in Manhattan, is expected to take several months and include testimony from victims who suffered severe injuries from what prosecutors labeled “a horrific, depraved act.”
The jury was also shown a montage of security camera videos from Times Square in which the car mounted a sidewalk and hurtled into a crowd of people, setting off a wave of panic.
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, steered his car onto a sidewalk, and roared back up the sidewalk for three blocks before he crashed his car into protective barriers. Rojas pleaded not guilty to murder, assault and other charges in 2017 and has since been jailed at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex.