Good thing he didn’t try this at Rikers.
Killer boy-toy Renato Seabra strolled the floors of Bellevue Hospital’s jail ward naked, invited psych nurses into his bed, called himself “Jesus” and praised his lips as “beautiful,” a shrink testified yesterday at the start of the insanity-defense case.
Seabra, 22, was consistently manic, delusional and otherwise psychotic in the hours and days after admittedly bludgeoning and castrating his wealthy 65-year-old lover in their Midtown hotel room, the first defense expert witness, Dr. Jeffrey Singer, told a Manhattan murder jury.
“At one point, he began singing and smiling inappropriately — talking abut his lips, and how beautiful they were,” Singer testified, reading from medical records from Bellevue, where Seabra was taken the morning after admittedly castrating fashion journalist Carlos Castro alive with a corkscrew, then bludgeoning him to death.The two 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.Defense psych testimony is expected to continue today.
Seabra a fame-besotted 22-year-old, and Castro, a 65-year-old fashion and gossip journalist, had been on vacation from their native Portugal.
Under direct examination by defense lawyer Rubin Sinins, the shrink told jurors that it is his expert belief that Seabra was too mentally ill to understand the wrongfullness of his actions in killing and mutilating the older man. “He was out of touch with reality,” the shrink told jurors.