He was “jacked up,” laughing bizarrely, and promising to save the world.
Killer boy toy Renato Seabra appeared so immediately and obviously crazy, that doctors quickly dosed him with anti-psychotics and diagnosed him with bipolar disorder, a shrink testified this morning at the start of the defense insanity case.
“When I hold this in my hand, I know that I can do anything!” Seabra, 22, announced while holding a small card in his hand, soon after being admitted to Roosevelt Hospital.
“You are trying to control me!” he railed.
The thin young underwear model had hopped a cab to the West Side hospital just three or four hours after bludgeoning and castrating alive his much older lover in their Time Square hotel room on a January afternoon in 2011.
Seabra was a fame-besotted 22-year-old, and Castro was a 65-year-old fashion and gossip journalist.
The doomed couple had been on vacation from their native Portugal, and were splitting over Seabra’s sudden announcement that he was now interested in girls, according to testimony.
Prosecutors say Seabra killed and mutilated the likely unconscious Castro with a corkscrew out of rage that after three months of cash and gifts, the gravy train was moving on without him.
According to this morning’s testimony Seabra, who had superficially cut his own wrists after the slaying, spent five hours at Roosevelt, where shrinks recorded him laughing inappropriately, announcing “I can change the world,” and trying to lay his hands on staffers so that “change them.”
“It’s a psychotic delusion of grandeur,” said the first defense expert witness, Dr. Jeffrey Singer, president elect of the New Jersey Psychological Association and a professor of psychopathology at Fairleigh Dickenson University.
Within ten minutes Roosevelt’s shrinks noted that he “does not make any sense when you talk to him,” Singer told jurors.
“That suggest that he was really, floridly out of it.”
Seabra was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, and then transferred within six hours to Bellevue Hospital.
“It is my opinion to within a reasonable degree of certainty that Mr. Seabra could not appreciate, know, or understand the wrongfulness of his actions on Jan. 7,” the psychologist testified, referring to the day of the murder.
“Mr. Seabra, at the time of the offense, was laboring under a psychotic, manic episode … his ability to accurately track reality was severely impaired,” he testified.
“He was out of touch with reality.”
Singer’s testimony is expected to continue into Friday.