Jurors sat down Monday morning for the opening of what’s expected to be a six-week trial about savage violence and psychological questions.

Attorneys made it known they’ll be reviewing crime scene forensics, internet searches, cell phone tracking, DNA discoveries and eye-witness accounts. But the biggest pieces of evidence, it became clear, will involve probing the recesses of a killer’s thought-world.  

In his opening arguments, Yolo County prosecutor Chris Van Der Hoek described 22-year-old Carlos Dominguez as a plotting, calculating young predator who had hunted defenseless people in the nighttime shadows and then hid and concealed anything connecting him to the crimes. Those crimes included brutally killing two men and seriously wounding a woman over the course of a spring week in 2023.

Dominguez’s public defender, Daniel Hutchinson, offered a counter-narrative: He painted Dominguez as a formerly bright student and versatile athlete who began slipping into the grip of schizophrenia and demented hallucinations for a year prior to the terror that overtook Davis.

These arguments were made almost two years to the day when the saga began.

The prosecution’s initial presentation included graphic photographs of the first two victims. Van Der Hoek used these images to bring jurors back to April 27, 2023, when 50-year-old David Breaux was discovered dead on a bench in Davis’s Central Park.

Breaux had lived in the city for over a decade. He was widely known around Davis as “Compassion Guy” because of his years-long endeavor to have everyone he met write their own personal definition of compassion in the notebook he always carried. Breaux was a Stanford University graduate, a former teacher and youth mentor, and a son who’d done his turn as a care-taker for his mother with schizophrenia. Around 2019, Breaux transitioned from house-sitting and couch-surfing in Davis to living on its streets, according to his sister. By the spring of 2023, he was searching for options to get a roof over his head again.

Breaux was sleeping on a bench behind Central Park’s playground when Dominguez launched his stabbing frenzy. The sudden attack forced Breaux onto the ground. He got covered in dirt as he began fighting for his life. At some point, Breaux managed to get up, only to collapse back and land on the bench. That’s where he eventually expired, his mouth open, his head fallen back and titled slightly to the side.  

Breaux had suffered 31 knife wounds.

Around 11 a.m., Aidan Reynolds and Ian Haliburton, two bird researchers with U.C. Davis, were studying nesting patterns in urban environments when they stumbled on Breaux. They saw a pool of blood under the bench and flies buzzing around the motionless body. They called for help.

Before the first day of Dominguez’s trial concluded, jurors had watched body camera footage from Davis Police Sgt. Antonia Dias, the first police officer to approach the site of Breaux’s corpse. The jurors had also watched Davis Police Detective Alex Torrez hold up three ripped, blood-soaked sweaters that Breaux had been wearing when he was stabbed.

Another item Torrez bagged into evidence at the scene was the sheath to double-bladed Smith & Wesson survivalist dagger, which was on the ground not far from Breaux’s hanging foot.

“Other than this knife sheath, there’s no finger prints, there’s no DNA, there’s no witnesses, there’s no surveillance video” Van Der Hoek remarked. “This is a very clean crime scene.”

Next, Van Der Hoek used photos to steer jurors to what happened in Davis’s Sycamore Park two nights after Breaux’s killing. That’s when 20-year-old Karim Abou Najm was riding his bike home through a lightless part of the recreation area and was ambushed.

A doctor living across the street from Sycamore Park heard a young man screaming for help. Thinking there might have been a bike collision, the doctor hurried out into the darkness. He arrived as Dominguez was still in the act of murdering Najm. The assailant jumped on his latest victim’s bicycle before riding off across a bridge.

The doctor tried to save Najm’s life. It was so pitch black along the path that he needed the flashlight on his phone to start CPR. But the physician was fighting an impossible battle. Najm had suffered more than 52 knife wounds. When Van Der Hoek showed a photo of Najm’s body on the court’s display screen, there was a collective gasp heard around the room.

“The vast majority of these [knife wounds] are to his chest, right in the area of his heart,” Van Der Hoek stressed. “He’s also sustained knife injuries to his neck, his face, and there was even one coming into his lip that knocked out one of his teeth and left his teeth on the ground there.”

Dominguez left a bloody fingerprint on a water bottle at that crime scene.

“Two nights before he killed Karim in Sycamore Park, he went there and walked around,” Van Der Hoek said of Dominguez, referencing phone-tracking data. 

That was just one of many points in Van Der Hoek’s opener that tried to highlight proof of conscious, determined planning on the part of the defendant – not the actions of someone lost in the fog of psychosis.

Van Der Hoek told the jurors that Dominguez staked-out the homeless encampment in downtown Davis before he ultimately attacked Kimberly Gullory in it on May 1, 2023. Dominguez stabbed Gullory through the side of her tent, lacerating one of her vital organs.

Van Der Hoek also emphasized that Dominguez had powered-down his phone – or left it entirely behind – during each of the stabbing crimes, as well as allegedly took steps to get rid of blood evidence on his clothes. And, when Davis patrol officers finally confronted Dominguez after an observant citizen noticed him casing Sycamore Park again with a Halloween shopping bag (the bag was concealing the murder weapon, a Smith & Wesson double-bladed dagger) Dominguez had the presence of mind to lie to police about his name, his address and what exactly he was carrying around with him.

“For each of those [stabbings], he did so willfully, maliciously and with premeditation,” Van Der Hoek concluded.  

When it came time for the Defense’s opening, Hutchinson telegraphed that he wouldn’t be fighting the evidence in the case, but rather compelling the jury into deciding a medical situation.

“What is not in dispute is that Carlos Reales Dominguez did the physical acts that caused the deaths of David Breaux, Karim Abou Najm and injured Kimberly Gullory,” Hutchinson acknowledged. “The question in this trial is not one of who did it, rather the question that will be presented to you is what was Carlos Rene Dominguez’s specific intent and mental state when he did those physical acts – what was happening in his mind. And the evidence will show it was a mind that had been devastated by severe and debilitating mental disease. Mr. Reales Dominguez has schizophrenia. Every psychologist who’s examined him has reached that same conclusion. And none have found any evidence of malingering, which is a term used to describe exaggerating or faking mental illness.”

Hutchinson pointed out that Dominguez had spent the last 21 months being treated with anti-psychotic medication while in custody. He also told jurors that, while the Prosecution keeps mentioning that his client was failing out of UC Davis and becoming estranged from his girlfriend and buddies, all of those trajectories show Dominguez was becoming completely untethered from an ability to understand what was happening around him.

“Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, behaves and perceives reality,” Hutchinson went on. “It causes hallucinations … These hallucinations can be fantastical and terrifying … When they spoke to you about what the doctor saw – he was the individual who found Mr. Reales Dominguez in Sycamore Park at the location of the stabbing of Karim Najm – what that doctor will tell you is that, when he approached, and he had a flashlight on his cell phone, Mr. Reales Dominguez seemed scared. He said, ‘What do you want? Leave me alone!’ And he spoke in a child-like voice.”

Scott Thomas Anderson is also the writer and producer documentary crime podcast series ‘Trace of the Devastation.’