Times Square driver says he tried to get mental help

A man accused of mowing down pedestrians in Times Square, killing a teenage Michigan tourist and injuring 22 others, said he had been trying to get psychiatric help.

In a jailhouse interview on Saturday, Richard Rojas told the New York Post that he recently spoke to a mental health counselor at a local veteran's centre but they never got back to him.

"I was trying to get help," Rojas told the newspaper from Rikers Island. "I wanted to fix my life. I wanted to get a job. Get a girlfriend."

Rojas, who lived with his mother in the Bronx, drove his car Thursday through Times Square, then made a U-turn and steered his car onto a sidewalk, plowing through helpless tourists for three blocks before crashing into protective barriers, police said.

After he was detained, he said he wanted to "kill them all" and that police should have shot him to stop him, a prosecutor said at his court appearance on Friday. They said Rojas also admitted to smoking marijuana laced with PCP sometime before the crash. Officials are awaiting toxicology reports.

"I just want to apologise to all the victims' families ... I want to apologise to my mom," Rojas said tearfully during the interview. "The last thing I remember is driving in my car," Rojas recalled. "Then, I woke up in the precinct ... I was terrified."

A makeshift memorial to Elsman sprung up in Times Square over the weekend, with well-wishers leaving gifts and messages on an NYPD barricade placed at the intersection of West 45th Street and Seventh Avenue, where Rojas's rampage came to an end.