Castillo’s interests were known:
It seems that Alvaro Castillo’s obsession with Columbine was not his only obsession…
Investigators knew in April that a teenager now accused of killing his father before opening fire outside Orange High School was fascinated with school shootings, according to a high-school acquaintance who received a video from him saying he was going to kill himself.
Alvaro Castillo sent Anna Rose the video last spring. It came in the mail April 22, two days after Castillo was picked up by Orange County Sheriff’s deputies and committed to a local hospital after his parents reported that he was suicidal.Rose was away at college when the video arrived at her family’s home, but her mother, Bonnie, immediately called 911 when her son started watching it that night. A deputy came to get the tape.
Rose’s brother played some of the video over the phone to her that night, and she was so scared she didn’t return home for a couple of months, she said.
Rose said in an interview Wednesday that she met with Lt. Larry Faucette at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office a few days later and Faucette showed her Castillo’s journal, which included photographs of her and detailed his admiration for the shooters in the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School near Littleton, Colo.
The day that Castillo was committed, April 20, was the seven-year anniversary of those shootings, in which two high school boys killed 13 people before killing themselves.
Rose said Faucette told her that he had read the journal and that Castillo was “sick” and would be in the hospital for a long time.
But a few days after that, Rose said, Faucette called to say that Castillo had been released.
“I kept saying, ‘Please don’t let him go, he’s not stable no matter what they think,’ ” Rose said.
Castillo had a high school crush on Rose. In a video mailed to The Chapel Hill News last week, he brandished a gun with her name on it. The video also showed a second gun labeled Arlene.
Someone from the sheriff’s office might have approached Castillo, according to a letter that arrived at the Roses’ home after the Orange High School shooting. Castillo wrote to Anna Rose that he knew her “parents are scared.”
“The sheriff told me you went to the police department so I would not bother you again. I kept my word,” he wrote.
In the letter, dated Aug. 27 and postmarked the day of the school shooting, Castillo also said he would “die in three days or so,” and that he wouldn’t “go after” Rose’s little sister, who is enrolled at Orange High School.
Bonnie Rose said she couldn’t understand why the system could not do more to protect her daughter and family.
“That’s why I sent an e-mail asking people to pray,” Bonnie Rose said. “I realized that was the only protection we had, is if God protected us.”
Which leaves me with two questions. Why did the doctors release him when he was obviously still bananas and who’s Arlene?
FoxNews.com published an Associated Press article entitled Should Video of ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin’s Death Be Released?. Of course, my answer is a resounding no but as Kate can attest to the death mutants are already scouring the web looking for the video. For those people let me share some quotes from the article with you…
For its part, Discovery Communications, the network where Irwin became a star, said there was absolutely no truth to rumors that the footage, now in possession of police in Queensland, Australia, might be released.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns that someone could attempt to get their hands on it and publicize it for lurid means — or just to show they had it. That, said media analyst Martin Kaplan, would be tantamount to a snuff film.
Irwin’s manager and close friend, John Stainton, had the painful experience of watching the videotape where Irwin pulls the stingray barb from his chest. He called it “shocking.”
“It’s a very hard thing to watch, because you are actually witnessing somebody die, and it’s terrible,” he told reporters.
Samuel G. Freedman, who teaches a media ethics class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, says the issue is “whether there is any compelling public interest” in the release of something so shocking as footage of a death. Here, he says, there clearly isn’t.
“The lay person is not going into the water trying to have encounters with stingrays,” Freedman said. “It would be purely titillation and necrophilia if anyone were to show this.”
“Only in the sense that there’s a race for the bottom in our culture,” Kaplan says. “This will take substantial vigilance on the part of the family.”
Do you see that? If you’re one of the freaks that like to watch real people dying then you’re a necrophiliac at the bottom of our culture. In case you were wondering there is something wrong with you.
With any luck, the video will be destroyed or locked away forever.
‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin’s Death Caught on Videotape:
SICK ‘MURDERABILIA’ VULTURES RAKE IT IN:
I know what you’re thinking. “Trench, why are these two articles together? They have nothing in common”. Au contraire. They have more in common than you think. Let me explain.
When you read the second article you think how reprehensible it is for people to collect things that were made by or belonged to serial killers. Then what would you think of people who collect videos of actual people’s deaths? There are a plethora of sites out there that deal in disturbing death videos. The more disturbing the better. What makes it worse is through the wonders of the internet the videos can be duplicated ad infinitum and posted just about anywhere. Some of the most sought out of these videos are the decapitation by terrorists of Daniel Pearl, the live on-air suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer, and now probably the sudden death of Steve Irwin. There are laws like the Son of Sam laws that prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes. There should also be some kind of similar law where no one can profit from the filmed, taped, or photographed death of another.
Now that it’s known that Steve Irwin’s death has been caught on tape the death merchants are probably eagerly waiting for it to get leaked so they can post it on their ghoulish websites to try to squeeze a nickel out of somebody else’s corpse.
We used to have a thing in this country called decency but not anymore.
Family, friends shocked by killing, reasons:
Victoria Castillo, the mother of Alvaro Castillo, denies the abuse claims made by her son as the reason he killed his father…
The mother of Alvaro Castillo says her husband was not abusive, as her son claims in the video on which he confesses to killing his father.
Victoria Castillo spoke through a neighbor who is helping the family amid weekend funeral arrangements for Rafael Huezo Castillo.
“I asked Vicki, `Did he abuse y’all?’ ” said Tim Fluet, who lives on a four-home gravel road near the Castillo family in Hillsborough.
“She said no.”
But Victoria Castillo did say her husband, who was a night janitor at Oak Grove Elementary School in Durham, was “very demanding verbally” and spanked the children “sometimes,” Fluet said.
Now I know some of you Nancy types think spanking is abuse. It’s not. It was probably namby-pamby people like you who put your kids into “time out” who put that idea into his head.
Fluet said he never detected abuse in the family.
“Honestly, knowing Mr. Castillo and just being with him, I don’t believe it,” he said. “I came from an abusive home. I know what abuse is.”
A former employer also spoke highly of Rafael Castillo, who Fluet said was from El Salvador.
Southwest Elementary School Principal Ari Cohen said Rafael Castillo was hardworking and friendly during the three years he cleaned his Durham school before transferring this summer to Oak Grove.
“He was an evening custodian so he didn’t have a lot of interaction with staff, but when he did he had friendly conversations,” Cohen said. “He was outgoing and enjoyed talking with staff.”
And he worked three jobs. Sounds like a real bastard doesn’t he?
Suspect in school attack, father’s murder obsessed with Columbine:
Another detail in the case of Alvaro Castillo. This time the reason of why he was being processed out of the National Guard…
Officials with the North Carolina National Guard said Thursday that Castillo entered the Guard as a recruit in 2004 and completed basic combat training in August 2005. He was never deployed and was being processed out of the guard after being determined to be medically disqualified for military service, according to the statement.
The Guard declined to comment on why Castillo was medically disqualified, citing confidentiality laws.
But according to court records released Thursday, Castillo was involuntarily committed to a state mental hospital on April 20 – the seventh anniversary of the Columbine attack – after he told his family he was going to kill himself with a shotgun.
Deputies took him into custody and “he stated that he was not going to go back into the Army and was going to kill himself,” an affidavit attached to the commitment order said.
Castillo was released from the hospital eight days later, according to court records.
I wonder what made him change his mind about The Guard. I mean besides the fact that he’s nuts. Anyway, that shoots my theory down about being released from The Guard as the trigger event.
Teen tapes confession to killing:
The Raleigh News and Observer report on material from the Castillo videos that they did not release…
HILLSBOROUGH – On a homemade video, Alvaro Castillo confesses to shooting his father four times, then walks into a room and records the sheet-draped corpse.
“Look at me. I’m not even crying. I just killed him, and I feel fine,” the Hillsborough teenager says into the camera.
“I’m not afraid anymore,” he says in the video’s final scene. “I have to die.”
The tape, along with a handwritten letter, arrived at the office of The Chapel Hill News on Thursday, the day after Castillo was arrested and charged with a shooting at Orange High School, and told sheriff’s deputies he had killed his father.
In the video, Castillo holds the camera close to his face and says he plans to kill himself and his father. Later, the teenager records a body slumped on a sofa. Two bare legs stick out from under a blood-flecked sheet.
Most of the hour-plus video shows Castillo aiming the camera at a small television playing violent movies. They include “Scarface,” “Predator,” “The Shining,” “Natural Born Killers” and a documentary, “Zero Hour: Massacre at Columbine High.”
Castillo narrates the violence, sometimes chiming in word-for-word with actors. He repeatedly uses the mute button to silence profanity.
Grisly scenes prompt a throaty laugh.
“Beautiful,” Castillo says, during “Scarface’s” final bloody scene, when the lead character floats dead in a swimming pool.
On the video, Castillo notes that he first watched these movies when he was 8 to 10 years old. He taped them, he says, to show how violent the world is.
Castillo also says on the video that his father slapped — but never punched — his head, back and rear. His father disciplined his mother “like a child,” he says.
The letter also claims abuse: “His threats and abuse took their toll on me.”
In another scene, Castillo cocks a shotgun and puts the barrel in his mouth, then points it at the camera. The word “Arlene” is written on a scrap of paper taped to the weapon.
Castillo says his suicide would be “the perfect instant killing.”
Near the end of the video, Castillo addresses the parents of the students he plans to kill, displaying a shotgun shell and a 9 mm bullet. He encourages parents to shoot themselves and reunite with their children in the afterlife.
“Once again, parents, I’m sorry about this. I’m sorry about the pain you’ll go through,” Castillo says. “If you want to be with your children, go with them.”
Castillo pants in front of the camera, describing his father’s killing.
Before turning off the camera, he says, “It’s time.”
I also have to commend the N&O for their decision not to post the entire video…
We were selective, however. We decided not to do what Castillo had asked in his letter — simply make the tape public and allow him, in the letter writer’s mind, to join the high school violence pantheon. Instead, we chose the four brief clips that illustrated the progress of the video and complemented the rest of our reporting.
We did not excerpt the graphic sections of the video (where he shows the camera his father’s body, for instance) or scenes where he clearly seeks to glamorize his actions.
We will not post the entire video, nor will we give copies to other media. We will work with the AP to make one of the excerpts available to other news outlets.