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 today, 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 in day two of testimony in the horrifying trial of a handsome young Portuguese underwear model accused of murdering his Portuguese fashion-writer sugar daddy as they vacationed in New York last year.
“Then I opened the door further,” the guard told jurors of his find on the 34th floor. “And I saw the body.”
Renato Seabra, 22, is accused of bludgeoning, strangling and then castrating Carlos Castro, 65, with a cork screw while the older man was still alive, though likely unconscious.
Prosecutors are calling it a cold-blooded murder, committed out of spite and rage after Castro 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 crazy.
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 admittedly 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 will learn Seabra was so crazy, that after he castrated Castro he superficially slit his own wrists and 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 answered. “Like it was sitting there a while.”
At about the same time, 7 p.m., 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 — holding his bloody hands together, according to the cabbie, 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 cab ride, said the cabbie, who became the third DA witness to testify that Seabra did not seem insane in the hours before and after the slaying.
Crime scene testimony continues tomorrow.