Man accused of killing 4 homeless men heard voices telling him to ‘kill 40 people’ or die — as trial finally gets underway

The madman accused of fatally bludgeoning four homeless men in Manhattan heard voices urging him to “kill 40 people” to “save his own life” — causing his 2019 killing spree, his attorney argued at trial Tuesday.

Attorneys for Randy Santos, 31 — who allegedly went on a predawn murder spree brutally bashing the skulls of four sleeping men in Chinatown with a scavenged metal bar on Oct. 5, 2019 — claim the sicko was off his schizophrenia medication when voices instructed him to kill or be killed.

“It was real to Randy,” Santos’s attorney Marnie Zien of the Legal Aid Society said during opening statements in Manhattan Supreme Court.

“He needed the voices to stop; he needed to save his life and didn’t see another way out because of the schizophrenia.”

Santos, who has been in and out of psychiatric wards since the alleged killings, is planning a psychiatric defense, his lawyer said — by admitting to the murders but proving he’s not criminally responsible due to his “disoriented diseased mind.”

“The defense does not dispute what happened in this case,” Zien said as Santos sat with one headphone earbud off his head. “We dispute what was in his mind at the time of the crime.”

The trial comes nearly seven years after the brutish beatdowns — where prosecutors claim that he randomly assaulted six homeless men in Chelsea and Chinatown.

The jury heard a play-by-play from Manhattan Assistant District attorney Alfred Peterson of each alleged Santos attack — including promising video of when he took a 4-foot-long metal bar and bashed the heads of the sleeping homeless men.

“A stick in one instance, a mental bar in another, directly down in one place on their body – their head,” Peterson said in court.

Prosecutors claim that Santos’ crime spree started in September 2019 when he went after Kyle Leonard, a homeless man, with a stick near 12th Avenue in Chelsea.

The victim somehow survived the attack, Peterson said, calling the first crime a “trial run” before Santos’ “big day” on Oct. 9 when he allegedly approached his first victims, two men sprawled asleep next to each other on cardboard at Bowery and Doyers streets just before 2 a.m.

After smashing the pair in the heads with the metal bar, Santos left them for dead before he circled back and stalked out more victims, according to cops.

Santos returned to the scene, Peterson said, because he feared that he “didn’t complete the job” — when he then decided to travel to East Broadway where he attacked three more sleeping men.

Four victims — Nazario Vasquez Villegas, Chuen Kwok, Anthony Manson and Florencio Moran Camano — died from the heinous assaults while one miraculously survived.

“(He) knew exactly what he was doing and exactly the consequences of what he was doing and that he was killing these men,” Peterson added.

Santos, who was 24 at the time of the alleged brutality, had a history of violent, random attacks before the killing spree, according to cops.

He faces life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder.

The trial is expected to last two weeks.