Carlos Castro (AP)
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Blood was everywhere — and face-up on the floor lay a man’s naked corpse.
“There was all this blood on the floor, towels all over the place, glass,” a security guard told a Manhattan jury yesterday, describing his grisly discovery of the murdered, mutilated guest high above the city in Room 3416 of Times Square’s InterContinental hotel.
“There was just damage all over the place,” the guard, Wilfredo Gonzalez, told jurors on Day Two of testimony in the horrifying trial of a handsome young Portuguese underwear model accused of murdering his countryman — and sugar daddy — as they vacationed in New York last year.
“Then I opened the door further. And I saw the body.”
Renato Seabra, 22, is accused of bludgeoning, strangling and then castrating 65-year-old fashion writer Carlos Castro with a corkscrew while the older man was still alive, although likely unconscious.
Prosecutors are calling it a coldblooded murder, committed out of spite and rage because Castro had decided to pull the plug on the relationship after three months of lavishing trips, gifts and the promise of a modeling career on the younger man.
Defense lawyers are hoping to convince jurors that Seabra’s behavior during and after the one-hour attack on the afternoon of Jan. 7, 2011, was so outlandish, the pale, thin model had to have been clinically and legally insane.
The security guard’s testimony gave the trial’s eight-woman, four-man jury its first peek into the gruesome crime scene.
“He was naked,” Gonzalez said of discovering Castro’s corpse at about 7 p.m., some five hours after Seabra, by his own admission, ended the influential journalist’s life.
“There was blood around the groin area, and his face.”
Defense lawyer Rubin Sinins had promised in opening statements last week that jurors would learn Seabra was so crazy that, after he castrated Castro, he superficially slit his own wrists, then held Castro’s severed testicles to his bleeding arms to “absorb their power.”
“So, it was clear to you that he was deceased?” prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal asked the grim-faced guard. “Why was that clear to you?”
“Because of the amount of blood that was there, and the blood that was there was very dark,” Gonzalez said. “Like it was sitting there awhile.”
At about the same time that Gonzalez was closing the door and summoning cops, Seabra was sitting in his best suit, hair neatly gelled, in the front seat of a cab at around 7 p.m., holding his bloody hands together, according to the cabby, who testified after the guard.
“He told me to take him to a good hospital,” Senegalese native Cheikh Bbacke told jurors of picking Seabra up at Penn Station, where he had apparently walked. Seabra made a bizarre inquiry into where New York City keeps its “waste,” but was otherwise calm, and normal, the cabby said in a blow to the defense insanity claim.
Seabra had told his doctors that he’d walked around the city touching passers-by to “cure” them of demons and AIDS, but there was no such talk or touching during the taxi ride, said the cabby, who became the third prosecution witness to testify that Seabra did not seem insane in the hours before and after the slaying.
Crime-scene testimony continues today.