Who is Carlos Dominguez? From UC Davis student to suspected serial killer
DAVIS -- Nauseous, shocked, a lost "sense of self" — all ways two former friends of the suspected Davis serial killer describe their reactions around their former friend, 21-year-old Carlos Dominguez, charged in two murders, and one attempted murder, for a series of stabbings.
Both a former roommate and friend did not want to be identified as they say they are still processing what their former friend is accused of and the changes they say they saw in him last year.
"I could not believe this whole madness coming down when I first heard the news," said the former friend.
The former roommate, who lived with Dominguez for a year from 2021 until 2022, said Dominguez was a typical roommate. The pair lived together in a house with multiple roommates and were social with each other.
"We would do things like play basketball, talk, play video games together, typical things of a house full of guys," said the former roommate.
The pair were both from the Bay Area and Dominguez took his roommate home to meet his family in Oakland. He was close to his younger siblings and called or FaceTimed them most days. He'd talk to his parents often, too, according to his former roommate and had friends from Oakland visit that'd known him since childhood.
"In my opinion, it makes me question: what does it take to make a murderer?" said the former roommate.
Dominguez would often share stories of violence he saw or experienced in Oakland growing up, according to his former roommate. Dominguez allegedly shared stories of fights he was involved in or saw.
Photos shared with CBS13 by the pair of friends show Dominguez at his own birthday party in 2021 with cake on his face. In another, on Halloween the same year, he is pictured with their group of friends. He "wasn't a loner," his former roommate said, and was social within a fraternity and a STEM program on campus at UC Davis.
Dominguez majored in Biological Sciences, but his former friends say his grades were dropping and he planned to change his major.
"We knew he was failing his classes. He was going to switch to psychology as he was failing, but that summer when we came home, we noticed there was a hole in the door," the former friend said.
A spokesperson for UC Davis confirmed to CBS13 last week Dominguez "flunked out" of the university.
Dominguez had a temper and in the summer of 2022, when he punched a hole in a shared door in their house, it was a sign to his former roommate that it was time to move on and away from Dominguez. The friends believe he had deep-rooted anger issues, but at last check, thought he was working through it.
According to his friends, and his former coworker, Dominguez worked at the Jack in the Box in Davis on G Street, a few blocks from the third stabbing that injured Kimberlee Guillory, a woman who was living unhoused. She is on the road to recovery.
"He was happy-go-lucky," said the former roommate, in describing Dominguez a few months before the series of stabbings, "Or so we thought."
The friends say they don't recognize Dominguez as he is now, with longer hair than they've ever known him to have. They say they aren't sure who he really is, at some points, they would describe him as compassionate but aren't convinced it was "honest."
"It made me dismiss him as being able to do that because the person I had known him for didn't seem capable, or didn't seem motivated to wanting to do that, for the same reason that anybody would want to not do that…to not hurt people." said the former roommate.
The friends say they did not want to speculate at that time.
When the suspect description went out, the friends briefly thought that it matched Dominguez. Their suspicions enhanced after the third stabbing, they say, when the suspect was seen by witnesses running off in a direction toward the neighborhood the friends knew he lived.
"For me, I didn't want to acknowledge that this was something slowly building over him, and was a part of him, as I knew him, but in reality, it makes more sense...to realize that this is something that he had been struggling with, enough to punch a hole through a door he shared with somebody else," said the former roommate.
The friends say they don't want to guess about Dominguez's motive because they say, the only person that would truly know the answer is Dominguez himself. He is due back in a Yolo County courtroom at the end of the month.
