A Manhattan jury has begun deliberations in a grotesque, boy toy-on-sugar-daddy mutilation murder.
Jurors got the case in the mid-afternoon today, and deliberated for less than two hours before breaking for the day at 4:45 p.m.
Tomorrow is expected to be their first full day of weighing the fate of handsome young Portuguese underwear model Renato Seabra, 22, who admits he bludgeoned, then castrated alive, his lover, Carlos Castro, 65, in their Times Square hotel room as they vacationed together away from their native Portugal in January of 2011.
Seabra lawyers say Seabra had suffered a sudden-onset mental breakdown, and did not know his actions were wrong when he bashed Castro in the head with the hotel room computer monitor, gashed his face with a corkscrew, strangled the older man, stomped on his head wearing two successive pairs of sneakers, and then castrated the still-breathing, but likely unconscious victim with the same corkscrew.
Doctors had confirmed in the hours after the gruesome killing that Seabra was manic, grandiose, disorganized, and otherwise mentally ill. But prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal concluded her summations today by urging jurors not to be fooled by these findings, which she said could simply be “the results of having just brutally killed someone.”
Sure, Seabra seemed agitated and stressed, and had racing thoughts, and was not making sense, the prosecutor told the six-woman, six-man panel. But “What,” she asked, “could be more stressful than committing a murder?”
Seabra faces a maximum of 25 years to life if convicted of murder, and an indeterminate term in a locked mental health facility if found not guilty of murder by reason of mental disease or defect.