Randy Santos, 31, is on trial in Manhattan for bludgeoning four men to death with a metal bar as they slept on New York City streets in 2019. His legal team is asserting an insanity defense, arguing that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is not criminally responsible because mental illness left him prone to violence.

The trial hinges on whether a jury will accept Santos’s insanity defense — a particularly difficult path in New York, where defendants must convince jurors they didn’t understand the consequences of their actions and didn’t know right from wrong. If convicted, Santos faces life in prison. If the jury accepts the insanity defense, he could be involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment instead.

Randy Santos, 31, is on trial in Manhattan state court for bludgeoning four men to death with a metal bar as they slept on New York City streets in 2019. His legal team is asserting an insanity defense, arguing that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and is not criminally responsible because mental illness left him prone to violence.

Opening statements began Tuesday, with his lawyer Marnie Zien telling jurors that Santos heard voices telling him he needed to kill 40 people or he would die. According to Zien, Santos believed he had to commit the attacks to save his own life.

“He needed the voices to stop. He needed to save his own life,” Zien said in her opening statement. “He saw no other way out.”

Santos has pleaded not guilty to charges including first-degree murder in the deaths of Florencio Moran, Nazario Vásquez Villegas, Anthony Manson and Chuen Kok. He is also charged with attempted murder for assaults that left two other men severely injured.

The Prosecution’s Case

Prosecutors presented a different account. Assistant District Attorney Alfred Peterson told jurors that surveillance video captured Santos “repeatedly lifting the bar up over his head and bringing it down on the head” of one victim. Peterson argued that Santos knew exactly what he was doing.

According to Peterson, Santos looked up and down the street to see if the coast was clear before starting the attack. He paused to let a pedestrian leave the area before attacking another man, the prosecutor said. Santos even recognized himself in surveillance video after his arrest, telling police: “Yea, that’s me.”

Police recovered the metal bar covered with blood and hair. Testing showed it had Santos’s DNA on one end and blood from some of his victims on the other.

Santos attacked five men between 1:30 a.m. and 2 a.m. on October 5, 2019. The victims ranged in age from 39 to 83. David Hernandez, 49, survived the attack and staggered to a nearby street where police officers were trying to revive another victim.

Peterson said Santos carried out a prior violent attack about a week earlier in a different Manhattan neighborhood, badly hurting another man by bashing his head with a wooden stick. He told jurors this showed a pattern of violence.

According to Zien, Santos was diagnosed with schizophrenia during his last jail stint before the killings. He was released in August 2019 and given referrals for treatment and prescriptions for medication, but he never used them, she said.

The Insanity Defense in New York

In New York, an insanity defense requires convincing the jury that the defendant didn’t understand the consequences of his actions and didn’t know right from wrong. It is a particularly difficult legal standard to meet.

The precedent in New York is mixed. In 2022, a man who drove his car through crowds in Times Square was cleared of responsibility and sent to a mental health facility after a jury found he was so psychologically disturbed he didn’t know what he was doing. But in 2018, a Manhattan nanny was convicted of killing two children in her care while their parents were away after a jury rejected her lawyer’s insanity defense claims.

If the jury convicts Santos, rejecting his insanity defense, he could be sentenced to life in prison. If the jury accepts the insanity defense, he could be involuntarily committed to psychiatric treatment for as long as necessary.

The four victims were among 319 killings in New York City in 2019, including 52 in Manhattan.