Death penalty sought for man’s 2013 torture, killing
Prosecution says 2 men guilty in slaying of man lured by escort’s ad.
WEST PALM BEACH — As Gustavo Mora Falsetti Cabral’s widow cried silently in a Palm Beach County courtroom, a prosecutor on Friday described the final harrowing moments of Cabral’s life.
After he answered an escort ad on the website Backpage.com, Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts explained to a jury, Cabral was robbed, kidnapped and tortured until someone — either Jefty Joseph or Ilmart Christophe — put a bullet in his head inside an abandoned building in unincorporated Lake Worth.
“It won’t matter under the law that you won’t know who pulled the trigger,” McRoberts said, marking the start of Joseph’s trial. “Both are guilty under the law.”
Although prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against both Joseph and Christophe, it was Joseph’s trial that began Friday after more than three days of jury selection in the case. Christophe is awaiting trial.
If McRoberts and Assistant State Attorney Terri Skiles convince a jury that Joseph is guilty of first-degree murder, they will try to make the 24-year-old Lake
Worth man the first person in nearly two decades to receive a death sentence in Palm Beach County state court.
Though each man named the other as the killer, McRoberts told jurors both are equally guilty of the murder that she said came after they kidnapped, tortured and terrorized Cabral.
In her opening statements, McRoberts said Cabral, 31, had recently moved to Pompano Beach from his native Brazil, where he left behind a wife and two kids to come to the United States and open a mixed martial arts gym.
Though Joseph initially described for investigators a night of gambling and drinking with Cabral, who he claimed he’d known since they were children, investigators would later piece together a different version of events through surveillance video andthe statement of a third person arrested weeks after the Dec. 1, 2013, murder.
Koral Ben Shimon, 24, of Greenacres, was the woman behind the escort ad Cabral answered, which advertised her as “Belle Ayrab Barbie/ Sexy AngelineLatina.” Surveillance records show Ben Shimon and Cabral met at a Super 8 Motel in Coconut Creek.
Ben Shimon, who will testify against Joseph as part of a plea agreement in which prosecutors agreed to drop murder charges against her in exchange for a 10-year prison sentence on robbery and kidnapping charges, told police she and the two men planned to rob Cabral. She said they took $400 from his pockets, then forced him to call his credit card company to try to raise his credit card limits so they could take more, according to arrest reports.
At some point during the trial next week, Ben Shimon is expected to testify that Christophe told her to drive to his mother’s Lake Worth home in the Indian Pines community and Christophe and Joseph followed in Cabral’s car after they tied Cabral up and forced him from the hotel room at gunpoint. She is expected to testify that she was unaware that her two accomplices were going to kill Cabral.
In his first words in the trial to jurors Friday, Joseph’s attorney, Scott Skier, said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to support prose- cutors’ version of events.
Referencing the movie “Jerry McGuire” and urging jurors to demand prosecutors “show me the evidence,” Skier said the most important evidence in the case appears to show that Cabral hadn’t been kidnapped at all.
If Cabral, an MMA fighter had been in a situation where someone tried to tie him down in a hotel room, cer- tainly there would be more signs of a struggle, Skier said. And although a hotel security officer will testify that the sight of Cabral leaving with the two men and young woman appeared strange, Skier said, the worker will also say Cabral didn’t appear to be taken against his will.
Had he been kidnapped, Skier said, surely Cabral would have alerted someone after being in several public places with his would-be kill- ers before his death.
“He could’ve stopped, dropped and rolled — you know, the old fire trick? He could’ve started talking in tongues or doing something to let someone know ‘Hey, I’m in trouble here,’” Skier said of the victim.
Skier, who represents Joseph along with defense attorneys Robert Gershman and Shaun Rosenberg, said there was no eyewitness to the shooting, no murder weapon and the prosecutors’ star witness was co-defen- dant Ben Shimon, who Skier referred to several times in his opening statements as “the prostitute.”
Joseph’s crime, Skier told jurors, was being a young drug dealer, not a murderer. Skier said Joseph was only there to procure drugs for Cabral at Cabral’s own request, and Skier denied Joseph had anything to do with the man’s death.
“For him, it’s the ultimate wrong place, wrong time,” Skier said.
After opening statements Friday, testimony in the case began with several law enforcement officers who helped with the initial investigation after witnesses heard a gunshot near the then-abandoned house at 5973 Ithaca Circle West in the Indian Pines development. Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office deputies captured Joseph immediately after they arrivedin the area, but Christophe ran and was caught in a home nearly a mile from the crime scene.
A witness later told investigators that Christophe said he was on the run because he’d just shot someone. Later, both he and Joseph would tell police that the other had gone inside the abandoned building alone with Cabral and emerged without him a short time afterward.
Circuit Judge John Kastrenakes sent jurors home Friday and asked them to return for more testimony in the case Monday. The trial is expected to last through the end of next week.
Although prosecutors are seeking the death sentence against Joseph on the murder charge, he also faces charges of robbery, kidnapping and grand theft of a motor vehicle.
McRoberts told jurors both men are equally guilty of the murder.