by John Glatt
“I did what I felt was necessary,” said the Michigan-based forensic psychiatrist, “to develop a sense of what these survivors went through and what they faced in the future.”
“What were your findings?” asked Assistant Prosecutor Anna Faraglia. “How were these women hurt?”
“These women were hurt in many ways,” he replied, “and I boiled it down to three. First is repeated episodes that were terrifying. And they were the kind of trauma that we meant when we define the post-traumatic stress disorder. The kind of trauma that you don’t escape for years and sometimes a lifetime, after the images, smells, touches. They come back to you when you’re asleep, when you’re awake, when you’re in the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness.”
Dr. Ochberg explained that Ariel Castro had actually changed the hard-wiring in their brains.
“Sometimes you feel you’re going crazy,” he told the judge, “because your mind isn’t working the way it should. This is not normal memory. This is the brain in a different type of circuitry. It isn’t simply an extreme of anxiety. They had that. That was a terror-induced state of mind.”
The white-bearded psychiatrist said Castro inflicted a whole new dimension of psychological torture, by using “degradation, defilement and dehumanization.”
“Being systematically and relentlessly deprived of your sense of self, your sense of dignity, your connection to others. And that has to do with not having access to sanitary facilities, the way you’re fed, the way you’re chained—all of that for a long, long time.”
He said Castro had also robbed his victims of their family, home and school during those crucial ten years of their transitioning into womanhood.
“And that kind of deprivation,” he explained, “isn’t the same as being shot and degraded. It plays with your ability to know who to trust. This is the stage in which a human being is developing the capacity for real intimacy. This was not real intimacy. This was a perversion of intimacy.”
Dr. Ochberg noted how Castro would portray his daughter with Amanda Berry as a love child, despite repeatedly forcing Michelle Knight to miscarry her babies.
“Whether he believed it in his own mind or whether he feigned believing it,” said the doctor, “he tried to produce the belief that this daughter was a love child, not the product of forced sex in captivity. And when that happens, there is something that goes on in our minds and for a period of time we lack a real appreciation of what is real and what isn’t. We become bonded to the person who aggresses against us. And that’s the Stockholm syndrome.”
“Doctor, how did these women cope?” asked Faraglia, “for 13,226 days before their escape?”
“First of all,” he said, “among them are marvelous, compelling examples of resilience, of imagination, of humanity. I would start with Michelle. What an extraordinary human being. She served as doctor, nurse pediatrician, midwife. She did the delivery … and she did it under primitive circumstances. And when the baby wasn’t breathing, she breathed into that baby. She brought life to that child.”
Dr. Ochberg said he had also been moved by Amanda, who had raised Jocelyn under the most difficult circumstances.
“Amanda managed … to teach that child values and faith and school her,” he said. “And there were times when there was interaction among them, and by and large that interaction showed the milk of human kindness, love, faith, optimism. So they coped and part of it was the Stockholm syndrome, but part of it are the gifts and personality and character that they had.”
Finally, the assistant prosecutor asked about their prognosis for the future.
“I want to be on the side of optimism and encouragement and hope for them,” he said. “But the damage that was done does not go away. They have life sentences. This was not trivial. I think they will, with the love and support of this whole community, and what they bring to the table, have a good chance to have a good life. But that doesn’t mean that they will ever be free of the damage that was done.”
“And would you agree with me, Doctor,” said Faraglia, “that their injuries are that of a permanent nature?”
“Yes,” he replied.
Then Judge Russo called a ten-minute recess to prepare for the victim-impact statements.
34
“I AM NOT A MONSTER”
At 11:49 A.M., Michelle Knight walked into the courtroom, escorted by a victim’s advocate. Wearing a simple gray floral dress, Ariel Castro’s first victim looked confident and assured as she hugged one of her attorneys, and took her place in the first row of the public gallery.
A few seconds later, a jaunty-looking Ariel Castro was brought back into court and smirked at his former captive, before sitting down at the defense table. He appeared animated and excited, and his attorneys tried to calm him down, as he would soon be addressing the court.
At 12:05, Assistant Prosecutor Anna Faraglia introduced Gina DeJesus’s cousin Sylvia Colon, who would be delivering a statement on her behalf. Standing in front of Judge Russo, with the DeJesus family attorney Henry Hilow, Sylvia said that today closed a chapter in her family’s lives.
“Today is the last day we want to think or talk about this,” she said. “These events will not own a place in our thoughts or our hearts.”
Sylvia told the judge that Gina was doing well.
“She laughs. She swims. She dances,” said Sylvia. “And more importantly she loves and she’s loved. She will finish school, go to college, fall in love. And if she chooses, she will get married and have children.”
She said Gina no longer lives as a victim but as a survivor, and appealed to the media to give her family the privacy it needed to heal.
Then, she turned to the defendant, fixed him in the eye, and said: “To Ariel Castro. Que dios se apiade de su alma!” (“God have mercy on your soul!”)
Beth Serrano then addressed Judge Russo, reading from a prepared statement.
“I am Amanda Berry’s sister,” she began. “The impact of these crimes on our family is something that we do not want to discuss with people we don’t know.”
Beth said it was impossible to put into words what she and her family had been through over the last ten years.
“For me, I lost a sister for all those years and I thought it was forever,” she sobbed. “And you lost my mother forever. She died not knowing. My mother and sister, the two most loving people in the world.”
Beth said although Amanda was not in court, she’s “strong, beautiful and silent” and improving every day. Her biggest fear, though, was the way Jocelyn would discover the truth.
“Amanda’s concern,” she said, “is that her daughter will hear about things, or read about things said by the wrong people, the wrong way at the wrong time. Before Amanda thinks the time is right to tell her daughter.”
Then Beth asked that Amanda be able to control how and when Jocelyn finds out about her father.
“Amanda did not control anything for a long time,” she said. “Please … let her protect her daughter. She will do anything to protect her daughter.”
Finally, Michelle Knight stood up and, after hugging Sylvia Colon and Beth Serrano, walked straight past Ariel Castro without giving him a look. Her attorney had advised against attending the sentencing and seeing Castro again, but Michelle was determined to “face my demon.” She had spent the last few days writing her statement, which would finally free her from the tyranny of Ariel Castro.
“Good afternoon,” she began, speaking clearly. “My name is Michelle Knight and I would like to tell you what this was like for me.”
She told the judge that she had missed her son, Joey, every single day of her eleven-year captivity, crying herself to sleep thinking about him.
“I was so alone,” she said. “Days turned into nights. Nights turned into days. The years turned into eternity.”
Michelle said she knew no one cared about her, especially as Castro constantly reminded her of it. Christmas was the “most traumatic” day of the year for her, k
nowing there was no one out there looking for her.
“Nobody should ever have to go through what I went through,” she said, “or anybody else, not even my worst enemy.”
She called Gina DeJesus her “teammate,” saying she nursed her back to health when she was dying from Castro’s abuse. Their friendship had been the only good thing to come out of it.
“We said we will someday make it out alive,” she said, “and we did.”
Then Michelle took a deep breath and addressed her jailer directly.
“Ariel Castro,” she began, as he stared at her, without a hint of emotion. “You took eleven years of my life away and I have got it back. I spent eleven years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning. I will overcome all this that happened, but you will face hell for eternity.
“From this moment on, I will not let you define me or affect who I am. I will live on. You will die a little every day.”
Then Michelle asked what God would think of him going to church every Sunday, and then coming home to torture her, Amanda and Gina.
“The death penalty would be so much easier,” she told him. “You don’t deserve that. You deserve to spend life in prison. I can forgive you, but I will never forget.”
Michelle told the judge that with the “guidance of God,” she now wanted to help others that had suffered as she had.
“Writing this statement gave me the strength to be a stronger woman,” she said, “and know … there is more good than evil. After eleven years, I am finally being heard and it’s liberating. Thank you all. I love you. God bless you.”
* * *
Assistant Prosecutor Faraglia then addressed Judge Russo about sentencing criteria.
“This case speaks volumes with regards to the defendant’s actions,” she told him. “If we look at the harm that has been caused to these victims, the only thing I need tell you is that 13,226 days of captivity.”
She said that Castro had lured two of his innocent victims when they were just fourteen and sixteen, using his own daughters as bait.
“He locked the doors. He kept them chained. He used dirty socks when they screamed for help. There was duct tape and motorcycle helmets. That’s what you need to consider, Your Honor.”
She said that as well as dictating their most intimate bodily functions, Castro “tormented” them by allowing them to watch their own vigils on television.
“And he even had the audacity to attend them and to talk to the family members,” she said, “knowing full well that these women were in his captivity. They were right under his roof. Again, what kind of impact on these victims.”
She asked the judge to punish Ariel Castro’s “brazen behavior,” and not show him any mercy.
“His actions have spoken so loud in this community,” she said. “I think Michelle said it best to you, ‘It was an eternity,’ and that’s why he deserves a new sentence. The minimum is a thousand years but this court can go higher, and the reason for our hearing today was to give you a picture of what happened at 2207 Seymour. It was by no means a way to disparage, to humiliate or to embarrass, or tell the story to a child. It was information that’s being given to a court of law to impose a sentence. And that’s what we did. Thank you.”
Then Judge Russo asked Ariel Castro’s lawyers if they had anything to say before their client addressed the court. Craig Weintraub said he had already expressed how the defense felt about the State’s presentation today.
“We feel it was inappropriate,” he said. “These are really private matters … but the sentence was agreed upon and Mr. Castro waived his appellant rights to challenge any of the facts in the sentencing of the case.”
The judge then asked Tim McGinty if he had finished his presentation. The prosecutor said he wanted to give a rebuttal after the defendant had finished speaking.
“If you want to make a statement, make it now,” said Judge Russo, losing patience. “Because if Mr. Castro wants to make a statement that will be the end of it. Okay.”
“Your Honor,” said McGinty, “as you noted these are unprecedented crimes that call for an unprecedented sentence.”
He told the judge that the defendant had taken advantage of “young vulnerable children,” in “prior and calculated criminal acts.” The three abductions had been a “disaster to the community,” and today the State had attempted to help the court get a feel for the “extraordinary depravation” all the victims had suffered.
Calling Ariel Castro a “master manipulator,” the prosecutor said there was no basis for his “sudden claim” that he suffered from mental illness.
“He has no psychiatric excuses,” said McGinty. “He is responsible.”
Comparing Castro to serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, the prosecutor said the defendant was a sexual predator and should have sought help.
“He has no excuse,” he said. “He takes no responsibility when questioned.”
McGinty observed he even blamed the victims for getting in his car in the first place, and not doing what they were taught in school.
“He has no sincere remorse,” said the prosecutor. “The only reason he pled guilty to this crime and this sentence was to avoid the death penalty. It’s for himself. For no one else.”
The prosecutor then spoke about Louwana Miller, who died without ever knowing Amanda was alive. And he revealed that Amanda wrote daily letters to her mother in her journal.
“Then she had to write to her deceased mother,” he told the judge. “She had to sit there and tell her loving mother what she would have told her. She then had to learn of her own mother’s funeral, and … that this man, the guy who goes to church on Sunday and comes home and beats and rapes her … had the audacity to go to their vigil.”
Castro had also interacted with Gina’s mother on Facebook, said the prosecutor, and brought missing posters into the house and put them up on the wall.
“He knows her mother is looking for her,” he told the judge, “waiting for her, begging for her, praying for her. And he has her in his own home and he’s torturing her.”
McGinty said that even now Ariel Castro did not believe he had done anything wrong, and had absolutely no remorse.
“This man deserves as many years and as much punishment as this court can possibly give him,” said the prosecutor. “We thank the courage of the victims. They’ve inspired law enforcement. They’ve inspired the prosecutors, and they’ve inspired the families, and they’ve inspired the other victims of the future.”
* * *
At 12:38 P.M., Judge Michael Russo asked Ariel Castro if he wished to speak before being sentenced. And for the next seventeen minutes, he delivered a rambling, self-pitying and often defiant speech from the defense table, as his two attorneys looked on helplessly.
“First of all,” Castro began, “I am a very emotional person. So I’m going to try and get it out.”
He began by telling the judge how he had been a victim of sexual molestation as a child, leading to his lifelong obsession with pornography and “sexual problems.”
“People are trying to paint me as a monster,” he told the court, “and I’m not a monster. I’m sick.”
Castro maintained he had always lived a “normal life,” holding down a steady job with a wife and four children.
“And I still practiced the art of touching myself and viewing pornography,” he said. “I believe I am addicted to porn to the point that it really makes me impulsive, and I just don’t realize what I am doing is wrong. I’m not trying to make excuses here, ’cause I know … that I will be put away forever.”
He then attacked his son, Anthony, for calling him an abusive father and husband in a recent television interview.
“I was never abusive until I met [Nilda],” he said. “She [was] saying I was a wife-beater. That is wrong.”
Castro blamed Nilda Figueroa for all the violence during their relationship, saying she had provoked him to it.
“I couldn’t get her to quiet down,”
he told the judge. “She would keep going and the situation would escalate until the point where she would put her hands on me, and that’s how I reacted. I put my hands on her. I know that’s [wrong].”
Castro said when they separated after twelve years, he found himself single again.
“I continued to practice the art of masturbation and pornography,” he continued, “and it got so bad that I used to do it … two or three hours a day, nonstop. And when I was finished, I would just collapse, right there.”
He then segued into how he had “picked up the first victim,” saying it was completely unplanned.
“When I got up that day,” he told the court, “I did not say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna … try and find some women,’ because it just wasn’t my character. But I know it’s wrong and I’m not trying to make excuses here.”
Suddenly, he became emotional, complaining that everybody said he was violent when the opposite was true.
“I drove a school bus,” he told the judge. “I’m a musician. I had a family. I do have value for human life.”
He said his life had changed after Jocelyn had been born.
“As crazy as it may sound,” he said, “my daughter just made every day for me. She never saw anything that was going on in the house, Your Honor. If anyone could ask her … she’ll probably say, ‘Yeah, my dad is the best dad in the world.’ Because that’s how I try and raise her in those six years, so she won’t be traumatized.”
Castro claimed that Jocelyn had always lived a “normal life,” and he would take her out in public to experience life outside 2207 Seymour Avenue.
“And I will take her to church,” he said, “and I will come home and just be a normal family. These accusations that I would come home and beat them are totally wrong. Your Honor, like I said before, I am not a violent person. I simply kept them there without being able to leave.”
Then Castro explained that he had been “driven by sex” when he had abducted Gina DeJesus.
“I saw her walking with my daughter [Arlene],” he said, “but I did not know she was related to the DeJesus family. I know her dad, we went to school together.”
