DAVIS, Calif. — A 21-year-old man, who was a University of California, Davis, student until last week, has been arrested in connection with a harrowing series of three stabbings in the college town, the police announced on Thursday.
The man, Carlos Dominguez of Davis, was booked on suspicion of murder after residents on Wednesday called the police with more than a dozen reports that they had seen a slight, young man who fit witnesses’ description of the suspect, wandering near the park where one of the attacks happened, the police said.
Mr. Dominguez was carrying “a hunting-style knife” when he was taken into custody on Wednesday, the police said. He was initially held on a weapons charge before he was arrested Thursday afternoon on two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
The announcement, which occurred just hours after a memorial service for one of the stabbing victims, was met with relief in the city of about 70,000 people west of Sacramento. The three stabbings over five days had shocked the residents of Davis, where the last reported homicide occurred in 2019.
“A murderer is off the streets and our families will sleep easier tonight,” Will Arnold, the mayor, said. “Now the work begins, in earnest, to heal as a community, to take back our shared spaces and to move forward as one.”
On the street where the police said Mr. Dominguez shared a house with several roommates, neighbors said they were still processing the news that they had been living near a young man who is accused of killing fellow community members. They said Mr. Dominguez and his roommates hosted frequent parties and worked out in the garage with the door open but otherwise did not socialize much with the neighborhood, where most residents are not students.
“I’m still coming to grips,” said Richard Houck, 82, whose home was behind police tape for most of the day while officers executed a search warrant at Mr. Dominguez’s address, a rental that Mr. Houck said had been occupied for years by a series of students.
“It can happen anywhere,” he said in an interview after the arrest. “It can happen right next door to you, right?”
Mr. Dominguez, who was also known as Carlos Reales Dominguez, was a third-year biological sciences student at U.C. Davis who “was separated for academic reasons” on April 25, according to the university.
It is unclear whether Mr. Dominguez knew any of the three victims, Darren Pytel, the city’s police chief, said.
The first was David Henry Breaux, 50, a Stanford University graduate who slept outdoors and was known to locals for a yearslong project in which he gathered and curated definitions of compassion. He was found dead at about 11:20 a.m. on April 27 in a park where he routinely talked to residents at the city’s farmers’ market. Colloquially known as “the Compassion Guy,” Mr. Breaux had been stabbed “many, many times,” Chief Pytel said in a City Council meeting this week.
Two days after that first attack, Karim Abou Najm, 20, a student majoring in computer science at U.C. Davis, was killed on a bike path after an altercation in a neighborhood park at 9:14 p.m. on Saturday. A witness who lives near the path told the police that he had overheard a disturbance and rushed to the scene to find the student bleeding from multiple stab wounds. He described seeing a young, curly-haired man scrambling to get away on the victim’s bike.
As authorities expedited DNA analysis of evidence found at the two crime scenes, a woman in a homeless encampment east of the city’s downtown reported a third attack late Monday, saying she had been stabbed repeatedly through the wall of her tent.
The woman, Kimberlee Guillory, survived, the police said, adding that she remained hospitalized and was alert and improving. The victim and nearby witnesses described the assailant as a curly-haired young man in dark clothing who had been lurking near the encampment.
“We believe that all three are connected, and we have evidence and information that they are,” Chief Pytel said.
It was unclear on Thursday whether Mr. Dominguez had any representation. He is scheduled to be arraigned Friday in Yolo County Superior Court.
According to a LinkedIn profile, he graduated in 2020 from an Oakland high school after interning for two years with local mentoring programs for students interested in a career in medicine. One program, the Oakland Health Pathways Partnership, featured an interview with him on its website under a truncated version of his name in which he said that hoped someday to become a doctor.
“I got into health care to help my grandmother — she has type 2 diabetes,” Mr. Dominguez, then a student at Castlemont High School, is quoted as saying in the interview. “Maybe people think it’s boring or it’s scary if you’re a surgeon and you see all that blood, but saving someone’s life makes you feel good about yourself.”
Before the arrest, anxiety mounted in the leafy cul-de-sacs, Little League fields and residence halls of Davis, a city where locals normally feel safe enough each summer to keep their windows open to capture the “Delta breeze” that blows from San Francisco Bay. This week, local businesses closed early, university events were canceled, and evening classes shifted to remote instruction.
The small Davis police force set up a tip line, moved to extended shifts and enlisted the help of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to help process hundreds of reports.
Then on Wednesday afternoon, calls came in about someone matching the description of the suspect. Carter Carlson, 23, an employee at the elementary school abutting the park where Mr. Najm died, said he was placing flowers on a makeshift memorial along the bike path when he noticed a lone figure, with a disheveled appearance, on the nearby play area behaving strangely. He called the police.
“He was pacing back and forth on a child’s bridge between two playgrounds,” said Mr. Carlson.
He added that when another man entered the park, talking on his cellphone, the young man noticed and began to meander away, walking toward a local strip mall. Mr. Carlson hopped into his Honda Civic, he said, and followed him until he lost sight of him.
Shortly after, he said, he saw several police cars and, eventually, at about 5 p.m., police officers leading the man away.
A native of Davis, Mr. Carlson credited not only the police, but the community itself for the arrest.
“Everyone has been very shaken, and everyone has taken this very hard,” he said, “but this community has really come together to support those who have been so unfortunately attacked.”
Jill Cowan contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
