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Chris Castillo works with Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation to abolish the death penalty. His work is a testament to his mother, who was murdered nearly twenty years ago.
Carol Baass Sowa | Today's Catholic |
By Carol Baass Sowa
Today's Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • Chris Castillo has a story he has had to tell many times. It is the story of his mother’s murder and the impact it has had on his life. That he is today the National/Texas Coordinator for Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation and working to abolish the death penalty is a testament to his mother and the legacy Castillo believes she would have wanted to be remembered by.
At a gathering at St. Mark the Evangelist Parish on Aug. 10, Castillo told his story again, reliving the day nearly twenty years ago that his life was turned upside down. A reporter for a Port Arthur newspaper, he was covering a double homicide on the court beat when the call came telling him his mother in Houston was dead. But they did not tell him how she died.
First came rage and wanting to break something. Then he tried to rationalize it as a mistake. His grandmother, who lived with his mother, had the same name. Surely she was the one who had passed away, not his vibrant, 52-year-old mother.
Castillo drove immediately to Beaumont to pick up his wife and one-year-old daughter at his mother-in-law’s. They were as stunned as he had been by the shocking news. The drive he and his wife made to Houston was, he said, “probably the longest hour and a half of my life.”
“Everybody loved my mother,” recalled Castillo. A registered nurse, she was working on her Ph.D. while teaching operating room technology at Houston Community College. Divorced when Castillo was 12, she raised him and his two sisters in a warm and loving environment in which their home was always open to family members and friends who needed a place to stay and every meal was like Thanksgiving, with people talking around the table for hours.
When they arrived at his mother’s, Castillo saw police and camera crews swarming over the lawn at the cordoned off house and his heart sank as he knew it was probably a homicide. A neighbor invited him into their home, where he watched on television what was taking place next door, including the removal of his mother’s body. It seemed surreal.
The police first suspected a disgruntled fellow officer, since his mother served on the police civilian review committee. Then they learned from his grandmother that two men from Honduras, who had been renovating the house and had a key to it, had come late the night before asking for money. It was surmised they returned in the middle of the night, entered with the key and strangled Castillo’s mother to death in her bedroom, after forcing her to sign some blank checks. Property in the amount of $5,000 was also taken.
Due to the grandmother’s having Alzheimer’s, she had not realized at first her daughter was dead, so it was a while before she went to a neighbor’s to use the phone, the perpetrators having cut the phone line at the house.
Since the workmen’s fingerprints would naturally have been all over the house from the renovation work, the police had no direct evidence to convict them of murder, and could only charge them with possession of stolen property, since they had tried to cash one of the checks. However, the men fled to Honduras, which has no extradition agreement, so have never been brought to trial.
From the first, anger gnawed at Castillo’s heart. On the day of the murder, he recalled entering his mother’s home to retrieve some of her clothes for the funeral and being incensed at seeing two policeman casually eating sandwiches in his mother’s living room. The following morning, eating breakfast at McDonald’s, his anger grew at people going about their business as always when his mother was dead. “She was like my best friend, so when I lost her it was just like somebody cut off one of my arms,” he said.
Eventually the anger spilled over into his marriage. “I had so much anger and so much pain and hatred inside of me,” he said, “and I carried it for a long time and it made me very, very depressed.” At work, he would joke around, as if everything was normal, but when he came home he basically shut down, ignoring his wife and child. This went on for many years until, on the verge of leaving his wife, they went for counseling. Here he became aware that the problem was not his wife — as he had thought — but himself.
For a time he also considered leaving the church, feeling angry that his mother, who had been a eucharistic minister and devout Catholic, had been so brutally taken from him. “I felt betrayed by God,” he says. Going through the RCIA program as a sponsor helped him find the answers he was looking for.
Then a major turning point came when an acquaintance mentioned that if he was Castillo, he would get a gun and go after the murderers himself. Reflecting on this, Castillo realized that would make him a murderer too — something he did not wish to be.
In trying to work through his grief and anger, he began participating with a local organization that held candlelight vigils for those who had lost loved ones through violent crimes. Eventually, he was asked to speak at one of these events, but broke down crying as soon as he began to talk about his mother’s death. Afterwards someone suggested he volunteer with a program called Bridges To Life.
Reluctant at first, Castillo finally joined the 14-week program that has victims of violent crimes speak to prison inmates in small groups. It enables the speakers, he said, to put in the inmate’s head “and more importantly, in their heart,” what the crime does to the individual and the ripple effect on families. The first day in the group circle, when asked why he was there, Castillo replied, “I don’t want anybody to go through the pain that I’ve been through.”
A few weeks later, feeling joining the group had been a mistake, he was reminded by an inmate of what he had said that first day, and it opened his eyes. It meant, he said, that the inmates “were listening and they were learning and they were changing.” The program is very successful, he related, as only 14 percent of the inmates who go through it return to prison for violent offenses. Otherwise, there is a 50 percent return statewide.
“Bridges to Life really brought me to this area of peace,” he noted, “and let me realize that all of us can make a difference in the world.” Those in prisons are still children of God, he says, recalling St. Paul, “and God can change their heart and turn them into somebody else” just as he changed Castillo and his heart.
Castillo has been working for about a year with Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), an organization composed of family members of victims of both homicides and executions who oppose the death penalty. Members in Texas participate in a mediation program in which victims of crime can meet with the offender to resolve unanswered questions about their loved one’s death — if the convicted has accepted responsibility for their crime, which some do not. When the two sides can come together, it enables healing for both.
One of the people Castillo has met through this work was a mother whose nine-year-old child had been murdered. None-the-less, she testified before a legislative committee trying to raise the age limit for murder of a child 10 years or younger to a capital offense because she opposed the death penalty. “I don’t want people to die,” she told the legislators.
Castillo and MVFR feel life without parole is a better option than the death penalty. Capital punishment only creates more victims, he pointed out, as the family of the convicted person suffers through their being killed, and family members of the victim suffer through appeals, which are expensive to the state. It can cost up to several million dollars to prosecute a death penalty case, he noted, with the money coming out of county coffers, causing counties to raise taxes. Some counties have gone bankrupt. The money could be put to far better use helping victims’ families, he contends.
More importantly, as more and more death row inmates are being found to be innocent, the risk of killing an innocent person becomes evident. And it is disproportionately the poor who wind up on death row, lacking funds for adequate representation.
In his heart, Castillo, has forgiven his mother’s murderers, realizing that such people, who seemingly place no value on life, have not experienced love in their own life. “I feel that the biggest gift that you can give anybody in prison,” he said, “is to show them that you care for them.” And that is what he will continue to do.