Prosecutors say they have video of Randy Santos beating to death four men in New York Chinatown, including 83-year-old Cheun Kwok, but the suspect says he doesn’t remember any of it.
“I was looking for bottles for cash,” Santos said in a jail house interview with the New York Times. “I needed the money because I was living on the streets and at an abandoned building. That’s all I remember.”
He said he didn’t understand the charges against him, blaming a language barrier. He speaks only Spanish.
“I want to marry. I want to have children,” Santos stated in his interview with Edgar Sandoval of the Times. “I take every class and activity they offer me here. I want to educate myself. I try to stay active, occupied.”
Santos reportedly has a history of violence and run ins with the law. In 2017, an investment banker accused Santos of punching him on a subway train while on vacation with his wife and children. Andrea Dazio needed 22 stitches to close the wounds from that beating. Santos was never charged.
That history also includes an attack on his own grandfather for which he has pleaded not guilty. He’s also been accused of groping a 19-year-old-woman and punching a 24-year-old at a Brooklyn shelter. His family blames his troubled pasted on mental illness and drug abuse.
He is due in court on the groping charge and for fare evasion in Brooklyn over the next two months.
Santos ended the interview when pressed about these past incidents.
“I’ve had a complicated life,” he said.
The three other victims in the murder have been identified as 55-year-old Nazario Vazquez Villegas, 49-year-old Anthony Manson and 39-year old Florencio Moran.
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