Jury learns victim was MMA fighter from Brazil

Gustavo Cabral recently moved to South Florida from Brazil to pursue a career in mixed martial arts. But the 31-year-old Coconut Creek man’s decision to respond to an online ad for an escort wound up getting him killed, prosecutors said Friday.

After Cabral showed up for sex in a room at a Pompano Beach Super 8 Motel, the married father of two young children was ambushed by two assailants, Assistant State Attorney Aleathea McRoberts said.

Jefty Joseph and Ilmart Christophe ignored Cabral’s willingness to hand over money, then kidnapped him and later shot him to death inside a vacant home in the Indian Pines neighborhood west of Lake Worth on Dec. 1, 2013, the prosecutor said at the start of Joseph’s trial.

“Despite Gustavo Cabral begging for his life … despite offering everything, they made a deliberate decision to take him in the attic of an abandoned house and put a bullet in the back of his brain, for no reason whatsoever,” McRoberts said.

She told the jurors they will not find out who pulled the trigger, but explained that “won’t make a difference” because both Joseph and Christophe were equally responsible for the slaying.

McRoberts promised she will link both men to the crime through video surveillance at the motel, banking records, a motel room key found in Joseph’s pocket, and the testimony of the escort, Koral Benshimon, 24, whose ad on Backpage.com lured Cabral.

If Joseph, 24, is convicted of first-degree murder, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office will seek the death penalty. Christophe, 23, will stand trial at a later date, and prosecutors are seeking a death sentence for him as well.

But Joseph’s attorneys, Scott Skier and Robert Gershman, said he is guilty of nothing more than being a drug dealer.

With the jury out of the room, Circuit Judge