Recent College Student Arrested in Three Stabbings in California Town

“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.”

Mr. Dominguez was living with several roommates in a house in Davis and had resided there for a couple of years, Darren Pytel, the city’s police chief, said on Thursday in a news conference. He 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, Chief Pytel said.

The first victim 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 just east of the U.C. Davis campus 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.

The next morning, police arrested a 30-year-old “person of interest” within five blocks of where Mr. Abou-Najm was attacked, holding the individual on suspicion of illegally carrying a concealed knife, and on an outstanding felony warrant from a nearby county for public intoxication and resisting arrest. But 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.