Carlos Reales Dominguez, the 21-year-old former UC Davis student who is charged with fatally stabbing two people and critically injuring a third, will be sent to a state hospital for treatment.
The decision was made last week when the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office agreed Dominguez was not mentally competent to stand trial for the criminal charges.
Dominguez is suspected to have killed 50-year-old David Breaux on April 27 and 20-year-old Karim Abou Najm on April 29, and to have attacked 64-year-old Kimberlee Guillory through the wall of her tent on May 1. The series of stabbings shocked Davis, a normally quiet college town.
After his arrest, Dominguez’s public defender questioned his client’s competency, suspending his criminal trial. What followed was a week of testimony by former friends, roommates and Dominguez’s ex-girlfriend, who chronicled the man’s descent into socially withdrawn and delusional behavior. Mental health professionals diagnosed him with schizophrenia, and it was determined that the criminal trial could not proceed.
Now that Dominguez has been found incompetent, the path may seem relatively simple: He will be sent to one of five state hospitals for rehabilitation, and, once rehabilitated, will return to the Yolo County Superior Court for the criminal trial. However, there’s no telling when Dominguez will get comprehensive treatment, how long it will take for him to be rehabilitated or when the trial will take place. Meanwhile, victims’ families remain eager for answers and resolution.
“For people who want this to speed through the criminal justice system, I think they'll be very frustrated with the pace at which the case moves,” said Michael Vitiello, a distinguished professor at McGeorge School of Law.
Vitiello said that although some people are never determined competent, he believes Dominguez will be.
“Given the diagnosis and what we do know about psychotropic medication, I would think that there is a reasonably good chance that he can be returned to competency and that they would go forward with a trial,” he said.
Vitiello said he expects the court will hear regular progress reports on how the restoration of competency is going. The first of such check-ins may happen at a medication review hearing scheduled for Sept. 29.
As for what will happen during the criminal trial when it commences, Vitiello said the “only plausible defense” is not guilty by reason of insanity, due to the amount of evidence tying Dominguez to the crime, including a large knife found in his backpack.
“Members of the public generally think insanity is raised frequently and that it is an abused defense,” Vitiello said. However, he added that “the data don’t support that. It's infrequently used and it is hard to win.”
Vitiello said it’s good that the case takes time.
“The public wants these cases decided very quickly,” he said. “And part of the adversary system is that people need time to develop motions, that it's not going to be a case where we're going to rush to judgment.”
The long path to placement
Although he has been ordered to go to a state hospital for treatment, it may be a while before Dominguez receives care at an institution. He’s currently back in the Yolo County jail, awaiting a placement hearing on Aug. 17. In the meantime, the court has ordered the jail to administer emergency psychotropic medicine to treat his schizophrenia.
“The Department of State Hospitals will get the [medical documentation] and determine which state hospital he will be transported to,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven. “State hospitals are overcrowded so this won’t happen right away.”
In the past decade, referrals to California state hospitals of people not fit to stand trial have more than doubled, creating commensurate rises in the length of wait times to get a spot. There are only five institutions in the state, in addition to three prison psychiatric programs.
Meanwhile, a longstanding labor crisis is coming to a boiling point: Doctors and psychiatrists working at correctional facilities, including state hospitals, voted last week to authorize a strike over strenuous working conditions. The workers, who are some of the highest paid in the state, say a huge number of positions are vacant, and are being filled with contract doctors.
In Yolo County, where Dominguez is currently detained, wait times have been as long as six months to a year. The Department of State Hospitals has recognized these long wait times as a statewide issue, and developed a Jail Based Competency Treatment Program to address the problem in 2018. A version of that program was implemented by Yolo County last summer, with 7 beds available. The county said it did not have the authority to share whether Dominguez is receiving care through the jail-based competency services.
In 2018, when the Department of State Hospitals last published an annual report, they counted they’d provided care to about 12,000 people. Most of those patients came as referrals from county courts, prisons or parole boards.
When Dominguez is sent to a state hospital he will be part of the 1% of patients who have received “some college” education, and the approximately 40% who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In a 2021 workgroup report, the California Health & Human Services Agency and the Department of State Hospitals reported that the average length of stay for patients found not fit to stand trial was roughly five months in a state hospital bed and about two and a half months in a jail-based competency bed.
Deferred grief
For Maria Breaux, the sister of the late David Breaux, the latest development produced a mixed bag of emotions. She told CapRadio she was relieved when she heard from the DA’s office that the challenge to the competency finding would be dropped. After hearing a week of testimony from Dominguez’s friends, former roommates and doctors, she wants to hear from Dominguez himself.
“I wish him well in terms of health, and I wish him well in terms of memory and what he can tell us as to why this particular thing happened, even if it makes no sense, even if it was done in the heat of a schizophrenic episode,” she said. “I think speaking for myself and likely speaking for others, I would just like to know the why.”
Meanwhile, she’s been processing the many ups and downs of grief: clarity, disbelief, great sadness. She’s eager for a speedy resolution.
“It would be good to get resolution to allow myself a proper grieving process,” she said. “It's much more difficult when there is a murder trial involved and then all of the attendant grief with that.”
Breaux says she’s been talking about one subject more regularly with friends, and friends of David’s: The fragility of the human mind.
“Mental health is a serious thing,” she said. “I think if anything, I'm learning that young people and everyone, but especially young people in college, just need resources for understanding what mental illness is, how it manifests, different mental illnesses, and where to go, what to do if you have a loved one or if you yourself are experiencing this.”
