Richard Rojas kills one and injures a score of others
You’ve probably heard about Richard Rojas who drove his Honda Accord on a sidewalk in New York City. He killed Alyssa Elsman, an 18-year-old tourist from Michigan and injured Ava, her 13-year-old sister along with more than twenty others. The press loves to point out that he was a Navy veteran. According to Navy Times in their Associated Press article, his time in the Navy was all fun and games;
Rojas enlisted in the Navy in 2011 and was an electrician’s mate fireman apprentice. In 2012 he served aboard the U.S.S. Carney, a destroyer.
Navy records show that in 2013 he spent two months at a naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina. They don’t indicate why.
Rojas was based at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida, before being discharged in 2014 as the result of a special court martial, a Navy official said.
A neighbor, Harrison Ramos, said Rojas wasn’t the same when he came back from active duty in 2014. Yeah well, that’s not what other neighbors told the police, according to the New York Daily News.
Mayor de Blasio said family members told cops that Rojas had been struggling with mental health issues since he was a young boy.
The incident “appears to be intentional in the sense that he was troubled and lashing out,” de Blasio told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer.
So he was a problem when he was a child and he was a problem as an adult – his military service had nothing to do with it.
Now Rojas says that he heard voices in his head and that he expected police to kill him. That’s hard to believe, too – he had to be tackled and restrained by Ken Bradix, a Planet Hollywood bouncer, when Rojas tried to flee the scene. But crazed veteran electrician’s mate is easier to understand.
Category: Crime
ugh, sounds to me like he was a nuke school washout. it fits the bill. EM, south Carolina, reassigned to JAX. Interestingly enough, when I was booted from south Carolina, my brig time was at NAS Jax, not in South Carolina. I wonder if they changed things since I was in that school in 04.
Nope. This clown would never have seen the APT, let alone the inside of A school in Goose Creek.
Also, as a nuke, he would have come in as E-3.
According to the news here in Jacksonville, this turd burglar assaulted a cab driver one night on Base over a $44.00 fare. Rojas said that the cab driver tried to charge him $162 and disrespected him. When the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office or JSO stopped him after he fled the scene he threatened the LEOS. Which is ballsy since everyone knows that JSO stands for just shot one.
When I first heard about it on the radio, the news yap mentioned his Military Service like it was the cause of his crazy.
Irresponsible media speculation that this shithead did this because of a raging case of The PTSD that was caused by his military service commences in 3…2…1…
You’re late with the countdown, Mick.
BBC and NYT had that online immediately after the incident, before the wounded were all in the hospital.
The Narrative!
And the crazed vet meme lives on. I thought I had enough to deal with as a middle aged, male, white, conservative, hetero, sorta-Christian, gun owner.
Not to take anything from the victims and their families, but the first reports all harped on this turds military experience. Somehow that really turned his life sour and he is paying it backwards ….jerk. Really annoying to me. The media sure has a hard time fitting their narrative to a story that may have been news years ago when some shootings were committed by “crazed” veterans. The guy never should have been in the military to begin with.
When a good guy joins the military, the odds are that a good guy with military experience will separate from the military somewhere down the road. Same for a bad guy.
Most of us leave the military with the same core characteristics that we had when we enlisted. Usually the same IQ, eye color and all sorts of things like that, too. Mental issues don’t get fixed simply by joining the military either.
Meanwhile, millions of US military veterans committed no crimes today or last week.
Infuriatingly senseless act. Seeing the murdered girl laying on the sidewalk made wish the crowd had beaten him to death.
It disgusted me that the news offered up his military service as a possible explanation for his disgusting actions.
I agree, Lars.
If I understand correctly, he’d been tokin on some synthetic marijuana laced with PCP. Add his mental issues, and he was some kind of messed up.
The 18-year-old girl’s sister was injured – and now has to live her life with the horror of this senseless loss.
And the news outlets were talking about him being ex-military first thing out the gate. It is disgusting.
Obviously, we need to ban Honda Accords.
Import lives matter.
If it saves one Prius…!
If Obama had a Honda….
My wife has an excellent take on this murder-suicide/suicide-by-cop kind of thing: if you want to die so badly, just suckstart a pistol and be done with it, rather than hurting/killing a bunch of people who never did a thing to you!
They don’t have the balls to kill themselves.
Once he is convicted I volunteer to personally put the fucking bullet in his head. I’ll even provide my own gun and ammo.
Scumbag piece of shit.
It’s New York. They are more enlightened than the great unwashed masses, and they know that capital punishment is not a deterrent. Besides, he is a person of color (is Hispanic considered colored this week?) and the victim who died is white, so it would be racist to execute him.
Hearing the media harp on the crazed vet thing is making me a crazed vet
I hope they hook him up with some electricity.
Not in New York, they won’t.
Then maybe run an extension cord to another state?
Just make sure All-Points Logistics does not have the contract.
The shit needs to work.
Kudos to the big bouncer dude that jumped on him to keep him from escaping or harming more people. The guy looked every inch of a raving maniac when he got out of the car.
Crazed maniac maybe,or was he on something? But not so crazed he can’t figure out how to mount a copycat vehicle attack on people doing their everyday stuff. I have immense respect for the LE who have died trying to prevent such attacks, and all due respect to the other victims. Good job done by Bradix
Still waiting for the day that the media gives equal attention to the college major, high school part time job, or car models previously owned by criminals in the background statements they publish. Not gonna happen, but one can hope.
“electrician’s mate fireman apprentice”
That is a rate I am unfamiliar with. Does it actually exist?
Yes. E-1 to E-3 are designated by field as well as rate (if applicable). In this case he would have been an EMFA.
E-1
Seaman Recruit (SR)
Fireman Recruit (FR)
Airman Recruit (AR)
Constructionman Recruit (Seabees) (CR)
E-2
Seaman Apprentice (SA)
Fireman Apprentice (FA)
Airman Apprentice (AA)
Counstructionman Apprentice (CA)
E-3
Seaman (SN)
Fireman (FN)
Airman (AN)
Constructionman (CN)
To clarify, if they do not have a rating (which I should have said instead of “rate” above), that is, no specialty, they are considered “undesignated” and would just be referred to as “Seaman Recruit” or “Airman Apprentice” or “Fireman”. Just another Navy idiosyncrasy: you can enlist without having an MOS. You can just enlist into a job field; it’s sold by the recruiters as, “oh, if you go in undesignated you get to try all the jobs in that field and then pick which one you like after you’ve experienced what each has to offer. Reality: You’re gonna all the scut work.