For those that don’t know——or wish they didn’t——Ariel Castro is the Ohio man who held three young girls hostage for the better part of a decade until one of them broke free and called the cops. I’m the biggest advocate of “innocent until proven guilty” you’re likely to meet, but there is no question of this man’s guilt except perhaps in his own mind. [Castro famously said the girls “wanted” to come live with him…a middle-aged man who looks like a Latino pedophile version of Bozo the Clown was apparently just too much for pre-teen girls who were into Bieber to resist.]
For months, he’s been the face that could pair perfectly with the “banality of evil” expression. People worked with this guy, were neighbors with this guy, felt like they knew this guy, etc. and the police apparently never even suspected him since he lives not far at all from where the girls were abducted. All that time went by, and not even a knock on his door by the Cleveland Police Department.
Not long after this story really started to gain traction, I remember saying “How long until some other inmates kill him and make it look like a suicide?” Looks like that question was answered a few hours ago when Castro was found dead of a “suicide.”
“But why would other inmates care about this man’s crimes?”—–Some might ask. Because sex offenders are at the absolute bottom of the prison totem pole…not exactly a place you want to be (better not drop the soap, Sandusky). And also because, you know, even hardened criminals have daughters and it makes them sick thinking about those daughters getting kidnapped in a way that dealing kilos of marijuana just never will.
Our prison system is notoriously easy to get away with murders in. And the corrections department would never even consider truly investigating a suicide. They barely investigate the outright murders, let alone anything they can pass off as a suicide, not wanting to have more statistics showing just how dangerous our prisons really are.
So Ariel Castro is dead, and it is almost certainly not a real suicide. That being said, I won’t exactly be crying myself to sleep over the news.