Camarillo caregiver on trial 'overwhelmed with fear' before assaults, attempted murder

A Camarillo man denying guilt due to insanity took the stand this week, testifying that he didn't know he was doing anything wrong when he tried to rape two elderly women and kill a 6-year-old girl in 2020.

In testimony lasting seven hours over two days, defendant Joel Gonzales tied his actions to untreated mental illness and what he believed were instructions from a magazine shared by a resident of the Camarillo facility where he worked as a caregiver. Gonzales testified that he thought the magazine and a television set were telling him to rape and kill and that he thought he would be hurt or killed if he didn't act.

"I was overwhelmed with fear," he told the jury that's been hearing the case for a month in a Ventura courtroom. "I started getting paranoid."

He acknowledged that he never saw the word "sex" in the magazine and that no body parts or sexual acts were described, but believed the publication contained innuendoes about having sex with children.

"That scared me because of the abuse," he said, linking his fear to the molestation he had suffered at the hands of an adult as a child.

The Ventura County District Attorney's Office has charged the 28-year-old man with four felonies tied to the alleged sexual assaults of the two women at the Royal Gardens care home and attempted murder of the girl at the home of Gonzales' relatives in Camarillo. He also faces two misdemeanor charges on suspicion of prowling and trespassing.

At issue in the trial is a chain of events that started Oct. 15, 2020, with the alleged assaults of the two women. A day later, Gonzales walked into a stranger's home, refused to leave and was arrested for prowling and trespassing. That night, he allegedly went to his relatives' home, where he admits repeatedly trying to kill the 6-year-old staying with his niece for her first sleepover.

The trial is still in the first phase to determine whether Gonzales is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If he's acquitted, the case ends. If the jury finds him guilty, the trial goes to a second phase to judge whether he was legally insane when he allegedly committed the crimes.

But jurors can consider the defendant's mental health in the first phase for the limited purpose of assessing whether it allowed him to form the specific intent to commit the acts, according to the prosecution.

Defense attorney John Taylor put Gonzales on the stand Monday and Tuesday with the first phase still underway. Speaking in a strong voice and in a matter-of-fact way, Gonzales said he "just felt off" a couple months before the incidents but that a whole series of strange thoughts, sensations, auditory messages and visions escalated in the days before and after the attacks.

He said he felt "extreme cold" like he was in a freezer, shaved his body hair based on a command from the magazine, heard noises from a television with prompts telling him to rape and kill. By the time he got to jail, he thought the wall in his cell was moving from side to side and in circles, he said.

Under questioning from his attorney, he described a series of events on the night the child was attacked.

He said he went to his relatives' home and walked onto the roof after seeing an open window. He thought the "people from the magazine" might want him to jump but a teen-age relative pulled him back inside, he said. He laid down to sleep in the downstairs living room about 2 a.m. and was prompted by the television to go upstairs and kill, he said.

He went to an upstairs bedroom where his niece and the girl were lying on the floor, according to his testimony. Gonzales said he walked past his niece, then knelt down and squeezed her friend's neck. When she didn't die, he banged her head on the floor three or four times but that didn't kill her either, he said. That's when he tried to kill her with an arm lock around her neck before his relatives fought him off and rescued her, he said.

Before he went in the bedroom, he had no idea why he wanted to hurt her, he said. Afterward, he said he felt "empowered " and "very angry" at the same time. "It was like a rush of emotion," he testified.

Prosecutor Tom Steele zeroed in on the defendant's intent in his cross-examination. Gonzales' choices showed planning, persistence and knowledge that what he was doing was wrong, Steele said.

"You knew killing was wrong," he told him. "You knew killing was a bad thing. Yet you chose to listen to those urges."

Steele told Gonzales he showed his intent in a series of decisions: going upstairs, walking into the bedroom where the girls were lying on the floor so he could kill someone small, going past his niece and picking her friend instead, then trying three different ways to kill the girl.

"I tried to kill her, yes," Gonzales answered. But he denied knowing it was wrong at the time.

"It just happened," he said. "It happened so fast. It was all in the moment."

Steele questioned the defendant's credibility by pointing to contradictions between the defendant's statements on the stand and what he had allegedly told deputies and others in interviews. He also said the defendant never told anyone about the magazine until he mentioned it to a deputy at the jail on Dec. 1, 2020, six weeks after the incidents.

The defendant said he had suffered from depression before the incidents but had not been diagnosed or treated. He was lucid on the witness stand and according to his attorney has taken the psychiatric drugs Risperidone and Remeron since shortly after he was jailed in 2020.

Risperidone is described as an anti-psychotic medication and Remeron is used to treat depression.

When Taylor asked him why he didn't show emotion during his testimony, he said the drugs had "numbed" his feelings.

Taylor said he was unable to answer The Star's question on his client's current diagnosis.

The trial was scheduled to continue at 9 a.m. Thursday in courtroom 22 before Ventura County Superior Court Judge Ryan Wright.

Gonzales is being held without bail at the main jail in Ventura.

Kathleen Wilson covers courts, mental health and local government issues for the Ventura County Star. Reach her at kathleen.wilson@vcstar.com.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Defendant takes stand in trial over assaults, attempt to kill child