NEW YORK (AP) — Jurors are set to start deliberating Thursday in the trial of a man who beat four people to death as they slept on New York City’s streets. His lawyers acknowledge he did it but argue he was too mentally ill to be held criminally responsible.
Randy Santos, 31, was arrested with a bloody metal bar in his hands shortly after the October 2019 rampage. It spurred scrutiny of the city’s struggles to aid and protect a homeless population that had reached record size.
Santos was homeless, as were some of the victims. The slain men — Chuen Kok, Anthony Manson, Florencio Moran and Nazario Vásquez Villegas — ranged in age from 39 to 83. Santos has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in their deaths and to attempted murder and assault charges involving other men in the hours and days before the killings in New York’s Chinatown.
Santos had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and his lawyers argue that he sincerely believed he heard voices saying he had to kill 40 people or would die himself.
Defense attorney Arnold Levine contended in a closing argument Wednesday that Santos might have recognized he could land in legal trouble but couldn’t appreciate that what he was doing was morally wrong. The moral factor would be enough — if jurors accept it and agree that mental illness caused it — to support his insanity defense.
“The only explanation was Randy’s psychosis. … It’s the only thing that explains what happened,” Levine told jurors, adding that “psychosis replaced Randy’s moral judgment.”
Prosecutors say Santos realized the attacks were both illegal and immoral. Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Alfred Peterson emphasized Wednesday that Santos sometimes looked out for potential witnesses and that he told a psychiatrist in 2024: “I know it’s not a good action.”
“Despite his illness, he was able to make a determination that what he was doing was wrong,” Peterson said in his summation.
The Dominican-born Santos, who’s following the trial via a Spanish-language interpreter, listened without showing much reaction to the summations. At one point, he briefly fluttered his hands near his face as Levine described a delusional Santos lashing out at his own grandfather long before the Chinatown killings.
If the jury rejects Santos’ insanity defense and convicts him, he could be sentenced to life in prison. If the jury instead finds him not responsible, he could be involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment for as long as officials and a court deem necessary.
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