Renato Seabra, the 23-year-old former model convicted of brutally killing and castrating his former lover, 65-year-old Carlos Castro, was sentenced to the maximum term of 25 years to life in prison on Friday.
Seabra faced a minimum 15 years to life for second-degree murder after a jury rejected his lawyer’s insanity defense. The Portuguese perpetrator said he would accept any sentence the judge issued as “I committed the crime.”
Justice Daniel P. FitzGerald of the State Supreme Court in Manhattan spoke briefly before announcing the young man’s sentence. “Here, an argument escalated from anger, to rage, to really a chilling example of man’s inhumanity to man,” he said. “There was extreme brutality, sadism and dehumanizing acts.”
Prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal described the ex-model as “deceptive, manipulative and dangerous” and read a statement from Castro’s sister and niece, who attended every day of the trial.
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“The other person could have stopped after the first insult, or before the first punch, or after Carlos Castro lost consciousness. Help could have been called and his life saved. But no, his head was bashed with a computer, the beating continued and ended with a horrific mutilation that has rarely been seen, if ever.”
Seabra attempted to describe through an interpreter, what drove him to his violent act.
“On that day, I don’t know what took me over,” he said. “I did not understand the manner and how things happened, and I could not understand why.”
