Victims recount horrors in car-ramming trial

For some survivors, the sounds are a part of what still haunts them. People screaming. Car tires screeching. An engine revving.

It was “like somebody just floored it ... It was so loud,” Jyll Elsman told a jury in a Manhattan courtroom. “That is the last thing that I remember before everything went black.”

When Elsman came to her senses, she desperately searched for her teen daughters only to find a mother’s nightmare. One of her children was dead and another severely injured — carnage left by a driver who plowed through pedestrians on what had begun, for a Michigan family, as a tourist outing in Times Square in 2017.

Elsman’s harrowing story is central to the ongoing trial of Richard Rojas, the man behind the wheel of a Honda Accord that killed Elsman’s daughter and injured more than 20 other people in an alleged attack with a motive that remains elusive. Rojas, 31, has pleaded not guilty to murder, assault and other charges.

Prosecutors are largely relying on the testimony of victims like Elsman to make a case against Rojas that could put him behind bars for decades.

His lawyers say he had a mental breakdown that day and had no capacity to understand what he was doing.

Prosecutor Alfred Peterson conceded Rojas had some mental challenges. But Peterson also argued the defendant was a military veteran who had led a mostly normal life and didn’t meet the insanity standard.

Experts are slated to address the mental health question later in the trial.