Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (35 page)

At the county jail in Cleveland where he had been held since his arrest, he had told officials that he was suicidal. But during the medical and psychological screenings given to all new inmates at LCI, he said he had lied about wanting to kill himself because he had been scared of being placed in the general population and wanted to be in a cell alone. He said he had been depressed since his arrest, but that he had plenty of reasons to live, including his religious beliefs, his family, and his children.

“He appears quite narcissistic, but does not show evidence of mood, anxiety, or thought disorder,” the medical officials who interviewed him concluded. Still, they recommended that Castro be placed on suicide watch and segregated to keep him safe, from himself and other inmates. Their report stated that his feelings about suicide could change “as the gravity of his situation begins to sink in.”
*

Three days later, on August 5, Castro was transferred to the Correctional Reception Center (CRC) in Orient, southwest of Columbus. That prison normally serves as the intake center for inmates from the southern half of the state, but officials made an exception to get Cleveland’s most notorious criminal as far away from the city as possible.

Given Castro’s infamy, Warden Rhonda Richard ordered a more extensive mental-health examination by prison doctors. Castro told them he was “upset” because other inmates had been shouting at him and harassing him. During the examination, Castro smiled occasionally and described himself as “always a happy person.”

The doctors found him “oblivious to the realities of his future situation, and . . . incredulous that the media and other inmates should treat him so poorly.” Castro told them that he wanted to “do my time in peace.” They concluded that he was a “low risk” for suicide, but they said that could change because prison life might “challenge his sense of entitlement and fragile grandiosity.” Diagnosing him as having “Narcissistic Personality Disorder with Antisocial Features,” they urged prison officials to monitor him closely for any changes in his mental health, “given his lengthy sentence, somewhat fragile self-esteem, and the notoriety of his crimes.”

Accordingly, the warden ordered that Castro be kept in the prison’s segregation area, in a cell by himself out of sight of other inmates. He would be allowed to leave his cell one hour each day for recreation, medical appointments, or meetings with prison staff. A supervisor would be present when his meals were delivered. Whenever he left his cell, Castro was to be handcuffed. Guards were required to go to his cell and check on him every thirty minutes. Those measures were intended to prevent Castro from harming himself or from being harmed by anyone else.

Castro’s new home was the last cell on the second-floor hallway, or “range.” It had two windows with a screen and two thick horizontal bars, a bunk bed, sink, toilet, and a little corner desk, a Bible, pen, and paper. From his sparse cell he could see no one, and no one could see him.

 • • • 

Castro started complaining almost immediately.

Guards said he was “demanding and pompous.” He often sat naked in his cell, and he was constantly told to put on clothes when female guards were on duty. He refused to leave his cell for recreation.

He began writing journal-style notes, and in the first entry, dated August 10, he grumbled about a guard who “mistreats me, for no apparent reason.” He hated his food, claiming that he found hair and plastic in his meals, and that they were always served “in a pool of water.” He wrote that he flushed most of his meals down the toilet. He was dropping weight quickly, and inmates saw guards holding up his pants as they led him to appointments.

“I really think someone tampered with my food,” he wrote on August 14, the day medical staff came to his cell twice in response to his complaints of chest pains, vomiting, and nausea. Guards who brought Castro his food showed him that his tray was randomly selected from a cart full of identical trays, but Castro continued to insist that it was being doctored.

His many concerns began to obsess him, and he documented them in his journal.

August 22: He asks for a mop to clean his “filthy” cell and toilet. He asks for clean bed linens and underwear, but “nothing gets done.”

August 28: “I’m really getting frustrated.”

August 31: “I will not take this kind of treatment much longer . . . I feel as though I’m being pushed over the edge, one day at a time.”

Castro also wrote an essay called “A Day in the Life of a Prisoner.”

I eat, brush, and go back to bed, get up, lay down, get up, lay down. This goes on all day. . . . I pace in my cell, meditate, stare at the walls as I daydream a lot.

I will never see light at the end of the tunnel, but that’s all right, it’s what I chose. . . . I’ve lots of time on my hands now to think and read, write, exercise. I want to make a bigger effort to try to commit to God.

I also get depressed and don’t want to do anything but just lay here . . . Most of the guards here are okay, but the younger ones don’t take the job seriously or they are rude to me for no apparent reason. . . . Sometimes I drift into a negative thought, I check myself and try harder not to go there.

He had two visits at this prison from relatives, including one from his mother. He was free to make phone calls but never did.

September 3: Last Day

On the morning of September 3, Brandi Ackley, a supervisor in Castro’s unit, collected his underwear to be washed. She had often seen Castro naked in his cell, and that day she noticed that Castro’s prison pants were loose and falling down. She left instructions for officers coming on duty later in the day to return Castro’s underwear when it came back from the laundry.

At 1:30 that afternoon Castro was handcuffed and escorted by guards to a meeting with prison officials to discuss his request to be placed in “protective control,” an even higher level of segregation and security. Castro was asking for that change due to “the high-profile nature of my charges” and seemed happy that this could involve a transfer to a prison closer to his family in Cleveland. He also asked about mail and family visits.

The prison officials recommended that the warden grant Castro’s request.

He was returned to his cell at 1:52 p.m., and guards checked his cell periodically throughout the afternoon.

At 5:29 a guard and a supervisor left a dinner tray at Castro’s cell. As they were walking away, Castro called them back and said there was a problem with his food. The supervisor again told him that his tray had been chosen randomly, but Castro refused to eat.

Guards checked his cell at 6:08, and at 6:30, a guard, supervisor, and nurse came to speak to him. He refused his evening hypertension medication, which prison doctors had prescribed after his arrest.

For the next two hours and twelve minutes, no one came to look in on Castro, even though regulations required checks be conducted every thirty minutes.

Alone in his cell, he placed a pocket-size Bible on his bunk and opened it to the Gospel of John, chapters two and three, which contain one of the Bible’s most well-known verses:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

He laid out several pieces of paper on the small corner desk. On one he wrote out the names of his children, including Jocelyn, and his six grandchildren. He decorated it with hearts, flowers, musical notes, a cross, the words “Daddy” and “Mommy,” and the exclamation, “God is Great!”

He carefully wrote the date, “Sept. 3, 2013,” on another piece of paper and printed several Bible verses in large capital letters, ending with,
“For all are sinners, we all fall short of the glory of God.”

He stacked up ten pages of complaint forms, mostly concerning food and harassment by prison guards, which he had never submitted, adding a few pages of handwritten notes titled, “I Found God” and “A Day in the Life of a Prisoner Who Has Accepted God.” In the neat pile he also placed a letter to his mother.

“Hi Mrs. Warden,” he began another note asking for permission to call his mother. “She and I haven’t spoken in nearly 3 weeks. I would like to speak to her, for I’m concerned of her well-being and she of mine.”

He set a pair of glasses on the bed, straightened his shower shoes on the floor near the wall, and draped his towel neatly across the sink.

At 8:51 guard Ryan Murphy checked on Castro. He was standing near his cell door, staring directly at Murphy. They met eyes. Neither man spoke.

Castro wrote out one final complaint form: his underwear still hadn’t come back from the laundry.

 • • • 

At 9:18 p.m., twenty-seven minutes after the previous check, guard Caleb Ackley looks into Castro’s cell and sees him hanging.

Ackley yells to Murphy, who sounds an alarm and runs to join him.

Castro has tied a bedsheet around his neck and knotted the other end around the frame of the window screen. His orange prison-issue pants have fallen to his ankles.

The officers lift Castro to relieve the pressure from his neck and tear the sheet away from the window. They lie him on the floor while Murphy runs to get something to cut the sheet away from his neck. Several other guards arrive and start CPR, thinking he might still be alive.

At 9:22, prison medical officers arrive and take over the CPR. Castro is unresponsive, then . . .

9:25: Prison officials call for an ambulance.

9:49: The ambulance hasn’t arrived, so they call again.

10:05: Forty minutes after the first call, ambulance medics arrive at the cell.

10:18: Castro is loaded into the ambulance and leaves the prison. Following prison protocol, he is handcuffed.

10:46: Castro arrives at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

10:52: Thirty-three days after he was sentenced to life in prison plus a thousand years, Ariel Castro is pronounced dead.
*

 • • • 

At 3:45 the following morning, Franklin County Coroner Jan M. Gorniak began her autopsy at the county morgue. In the cool, clinical language of postmortem exams, Gorniak described an utterly unremarkable corpse:

The body is that of a well developed, well nourished white male, compatible with the reported age of 53 years.

He was five-foot-seven and weighed 168 pounds, down from his weight of 178 when he arrived at the prison a month earlier. There were handcuff marks on his wrists; his right earlobe had a single pierced hole; and his nose, abdomen, lips, and internal organs were all normal. He had damage to his throat and bite marks on his tongue, which were consistent with Gorniak’s official ruling about the cause of death: suicide by hanging.
*

Her only unusual finding was an inch-high cross, in blue ballpoint pen ink, that Castro had drawn on the left side of his chest, directly over his heart, which looked like a small plea to God from a man who knew his Judgment Day had arrived.
*

Halloween 2013: Finding Peace

Amanda

It looks like a million kids are trick-or-treating on our new street, even though it’s a drizzly evening. Joce is dressed up as Blueberry Muffin, one of the Strawberry Shortcake characters, with a blue wig and striped tights. She and her cousins step outside and fall into the happy parade.

I’m still getting used to this. I walk along the street behind her and I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m doing something wrong, that I’m breaking some rule, that I’ll be punished for walking out the door.

For too many Halloweens, I wished I could take Jocelyn outside, but all we could do was trick-or-treat at Gina and Michelle’s bedroom door. He kept the house lights off so no children would come knocking at 2207 Seymour Avenue.

I’m trying to forget all that and move on, but it’s hard. Memories come from nowhere, unsettle me, and have a way of keeping me on edge, close to tears. But day by day it gets better. I love my new home and love that I’m living under the same roof as Beth, Teddy, and their three kids. They live upstairs, and Joce and I are on the first floor.

Beth found this house online. It was in terrible shape but in a nice neighborhood, and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage agency, had taken it over during the recession when so many houses were going into foreclosure. Jim Wooley mentioned the house to Mary and Rustom Khouri, developers and philanthropists in Cleveland, and they persuaded Freddie Mac to quietly donate it to us. The Khouris helped pay for a complete renovation, and an army of volunteers—overseen by George Shiekh Jr., owner of Cleveland Tile & Cabinet, and one of his workers, Paul Irwin—worked for three months at no cost to us. Many other kind people with busy lives, including lawyers at Jones Day, helped to replace the roof, install new HVAC, and make the place sparkle, from the new hardwood floors to the bright-pink paint in Jocelyn’s bedroom.

I placed three big words on the wall over the fireplace:
LIVE
,
LAUGH
,
LOVE
.
They remind me of the promise I made to myself inside Seymour that when I got out, I would remember that every moment is a gift.

So many people in Cleveland, and well beyond, donated to the Cleveland Courage Fund, set up by City Council members Matt Zone, Brian Cummins, and Dona Brady. The fund raised nearly $1.4 million, from more than ten thousand individual contributions, some of them as small as one dollar. The donations came from all fifty states and seven countries, and it was split evenly among me, Gina, Michelle, and Jocelyn. I put Joce’s money in a trust fund for her.

The Courage Fund money has bought me the time to concentrate on getting Jocelyn settled into our new life, and to learn all the ways the world has changed since I was sixteen. Whatever happened to pay phones? Now cell phones give you driving directions! There are so many things to get used to, like grocery stores. I load up my cart with food I used to dream about: strawberries, plums, kiwis, big boxes of Raisin Bran, and green beans. And, of course, ribs! I have to remind myself that I can just get a few things at a time and come back to the store whenever I want to, and he can’t stop me anymore.