Jurors shown horrific footage of NYC driving rampage that killed teen, injured 22
Jurors at the trial of accused Times Square car attacker Richard Rojas were shown footage of the bloody 2017 rampage that killed an 18-year-old tourist and injured more than 20 other people.
Video compilations released by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office show the dark-colored sedan allegedly driven by Rojas pull a sharp U-turn at 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue and plow into the crowd of pedestrians gathered at the “Crossroads of the World.”
Bodies of pedestrians are flung into the air as the car collides with them while speeding up Seventh Avenue, the horrific footage shows.
The vehicle then slams into a barricade near 45th Street and Broadway, forcing two of its wheels into the air.
The mad motorist jumps out of the car and begins flailing his body in the street — before attacking a traffic agent, according to the videos.
A group of good Samaritans, including the traffic agent, then pile onto the suspect and hold him at the scene until police arrive and arrest him, the footage shows.
Rojas, a 31-year-old Navy veteran, is on trial for murder, attempted murder and other charges for the carnage that left Alyssa Elsman, an 18-year-old from Portage, Michigan, dead and critically injured many others.
On Tuesday, Elsman’s mother, Jill, broke down on the stand as she remembered seeing her daughter’s lifeless body on the sidewalk.
“She was just laying there and she wasn’t moving,” Jill Elsman told the jury. “Her eyes, I looked into her eyes and I knew she was dead. They were staring off into space. There was no life.”
The heart-wrenching testimony came after Alyssa’s younger sister Ava, who was 13 at the time of the attack, took the stand Monday, describing how she drifted in and out of consciousness after being rammed by the driver.
“Everything went black but I heard the engine running,” she said. “I could hear people screaming and running but it was all black.”
Ava, now 18, said she “woke up on the sidewalk” with people all around her and “could not physically feel anything because all of the blood I was losing.”
“I was in and out of consciousness,” she told the jury. “Someone told me to put my leg down or I would bleed out.”
