ARREST: Locals spent terrified week as crimes continued

“there’s some degree of closure knowing who took David’s life.

“Of course, this doesn’t bring David back. I hope this young man, someone who’s someone’s son, someone who seemed to want so much to help other people, will eventually find the inner peace that David did through compassion,” Breaux said.

Citizens ‘delivered’

The events leading to Dominguez’s arrest began at about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday when a man walking through Sycamore Park spotted him sitting alone on the children’s playground.

With shoulder-length wavy hair, and wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black Adidas track pants, he bore a strong resemblance to the suspect seen fleeing the L Street stabbing scene.

“He made eye contact with me and came toward me rather briskly,” said the witness, who asked to remain anonymous. He said he backed off at that point but “kept an eye on him” as Dominguez wandered through the park, then through the neighborhood east of it.

“He was walking around sort of aimlessly, which I though was odd,” said the witness, who continued following the person from a distance to The Marketplace shopping center, where he briefly lost sight of him. Dominguez later emerged from a store and walked back toward the park area.

The witness said he called police multiple times as he tracked Dominguez, ultimately flagging down an officer heading westbound on Villanova Drive toward the park. Dominguez began walking more briskly at that point but never tried to run.

Additional police units responded to the scene, bringing numerous residents outside to watch the commotion. Dominguez, who initially was cuffed, left unrestrained with officers shortly after 5 p.m.

At the police station, “he spoke for a long time” during his interview with detectives, said Pytel, who declined to go into detail about his statements, although he did note that Dominguez were aware authorities were looking for him.

Wednesday’s tips added to hundreds police have received over the past week, reporting people who matched the suspect’s description and other suspicious activity being observed.

The description first emerged early Sunday, after a witness who interrupted Saturday night’s attack on Najm in Sycamore Park briefly followed the suspect as he left the stabbing scene with Najm’s bicycle.

Witnesses to the Guillory’s L Street assault, and the victim herself, offered similar descriptions following that incident. One man, Isaac Chessman, told The Enterprise he saw the suspect lurking among some nearby trees some two hours before the stabbing.

“We asked the community to provide tips, and they delivered, meaningfully,” Pytel said. “That has to be recognized,” along with the law-enforcement teams from local, state and federal agencies he said worked “tirelessly” to solve the case.

Neighbors react

Dominguez, initially held on a weapon charge prior to Thursday afternoon, remains in Yolo

County Jail custody on a no-bail hold, his arraignment scheduled for Friday afternoon in Yolo Superior Court.

A 2020 graduate of Castlemont High School in Oakland, Dominguez spent the summer of 2017 as an intern at the West Oakland Health Center, and the summer before at Mentoring in Medicine & Science (MIMS), also in Oakland, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The Oakland Health Pathways Partnership — a collaboration among the Oakland Unified School District, Alameda Health System and the Alameda County Health Care Services Agency — featured Dominguez prominently on its website under the name Carlos Reales, where he said he wanted to “give back to the community” as a doctor.

“I got into health care to help my grandmother — she has Type 2 diabetes,” Dominguez had said. “My grandmother used to take care of me when I was young, and now I take care of her. I’m the oldest in my family. My parents work, so I take care of my younger brother and sister, take them to school. I help with the cooking and cleaning.”

Thursday’s police activity attracted the attention of media and numerous neighbors, most gathering along West Eighth Street to observe the action, which was expected to last into the evening.

“It’s scary. You never know what people are capable of,” said Ryan Johnson, a UC Davis sophomore who lives a couple houses down from where Dominguez lived on Hawthorne Lane. Johnson said he saw the crime scene tape and investigators at the house when he left for class Thursday morning and worried that perhaps there had been another stabbing. By the afternoon, he was grappling with the idea that a fellow UCD student might be responsible for the crimes.

“I can’t make that connection,” he said.

Many students live in rental houses on that street, said Johnson, who moved there in the fall and wasn’t sure if he’d ever met Dominguez, but said he looked familiar.

Third-year UCD law student Jake Stanton, who lives two blocks down from the suspect’s house, was also taken aback that a student may have committed the crimes.

“We would expect students to look out for each other,” he said.

He was with two fellow law students, Myra Farooqi and Rachael Doty, on Thursday afternoon and all three expressed surprise that Dominguez’s roommates may not have connected the description provided of the suspect to someone they knew.

“It’s absurd you wouldn’t know,” said Farooqi, who noted it was tips from “random strangers” that led to Dominguez’s arrest “but not from roommates.”

None of the three law students knew Dominguez, but Farooqi said her brother worked in a lab with Karim Abou Najm, who Dominguez is now charged with fkilling.

“That’s when it became real,” she said.

One neighbor who was outside said he’d never spoken to Dominguez or his roommates but often saw them in their garage, working out and playing music.

“I guess you never know who’s living down the street,” he said.

— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene. Enterprise staff writer Anne Ternus-Bellamy contributed to this report.