Trial starts for driver who ran down Times Square 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 pandemic-induced 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 26-year-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.”
Alyssa Elsman, an 18-year-old from Portage, Michigan, was killed on an annual family trip. Her 13-year-old sister, Ava, was among the injured.
Ava Elsman, now 18, was the first witness on Monday, telling the jury how she suffered broken ribs, a broken leg, a collapsed lung and other serious injuries that left her “going in and out of consciousness,” she said.
When she woke up in the hospital, she immediately asked her mom about her sister. Her mother’s “face dropped,” she said. “When there were no words, I knew exactly what happened.”
Elsman described struggling to recover, both physically and mentally. “There was a whole piece of my life that was ripped out that I’ll never get back.”
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, now 31, has several prior criminal cases that paint a picture of a troubled man. Days before the Times Square incident he pleaded guilty to a harassment charge in the Bronx for pulling a knife on a notary in his home and accusing the person of trying to steal his identity.
He also had two previous drunken driving cases.