Trial reopens Times Sq. horror
Driver charged with mowing down tourists, killing 1, injuring others
A Navy veteran charged with killing a teenage girl and maiming another when he crashed through a group of tourists on a Times Square sidewalk in May 2017 heard prosecutors detail gruesome injuries caused by his three-block “trail of destruction.”
The victims of Richard Rojas’ alleged rampage behind the wheel of a Honda Accord included a New Jersey teen playing hooky from high school with a friend on senior skip day. She was “cut in half” in the attack, prosecutors told jurors during opening arguments in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“Her body was basically cut in half by Richard Rojas’ car,” Assistant District Attorney Alfred Peterson said of then-18year-old Jessica Williams’ injuries.
“Her pelvis separated her from her spine. They had to literally put her back together from two pieces into one.”
The Dunellen, N.J., teen is expected to testify at trial.
Rojas, 31, faces second-degree murder and 28 other counts for the rampage that killed 18-year-old tourist Alyssa Elsman, maimed Williams and injured 21 other pedestrians. Peterson said the injuries ranged from “lucky and relatively mild to simply devastating.”
“For three long city blocks, in the most congested pedestrian thoroughfare, probably in the world, he drove his car at ridiculously fast speeds — for three blocks — and he caused unthinkable destruction,” Peterson said. “Their bodies were literally stacked on top of each other.”
After abruptly making an illegal U-turn, Rojas sped north on the sidewalk on Seventh Ave from W. 42nd to W. 45th Sts., harrowing footage of the incident shows.
The first thing Rojas said to a traffic agent after exiting his vehicle was, “I wanted to kill them all. Just kill me,” Peterson said.
The Bronx man’s lawyer
Enrico DeMarco countered that Rojas, who enlisted in the Navy in 2011 and was discharged in 2014, was motivated by severe mental illness and not a desire to kill.
“He was a 26-year-old man suffering from schizophrenia,” said DeMarco. “A 26-year-old man that lost his mind.”
DeMarco argued the insanity defense and said his client lacked capacity to know what he did was morally or legally wrong. He said Rojas’ psychosis was evident by statements he made at the stationhouse after his arrest.
“‘He told me it would all be OK today, if I listened to him,’ ” Rojas said, according to a police report.
“Who’s he referring to? Who’s ‘he’?” DeMarco asked the jury.
Elsman’s little sister Ava, who was 13 when she was injured in the carnage, briefly testified as the first witness. She said her Portage, Mich., family had arrived in the city the morning of the attack for a vacation.
“A whole piece was ripped out of my life,” Ava Elsman said of her big sister’s killing. “I get jealous watching people with their families, because I don’t have that anymore.”