Ariel Castro, charged with kidnapping three women and holding them captive for about a decade, was found dead in his prison cell from an apparent suicide on Sept. 3rd, 2013. He only served one month of his life sentence.
It’s upsetting how Castro, a man who tortured, beat, and raped three women on a daily basis for the majority of their lives, was able to decide his own fate through suicide. However, it’s very odd that he was put in isolation and fed for that month he was detained, but those three women went through starvation while they were in his captivity. Somehow, he could not take any sort of pain compared to the kind he was dishing out.
Castro was most likely suffering from a mental disease, which would give some reasoning to why he committed these crimes and ended up taking his own life. However, to people who try to defend his actions, let’s not forget who the real victims in this situation are: Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry (with a daughter fathered by Castro) and Gina DeJesus. Just because Castro was suffering mentally, does not make his actions OK.
Although I am in support of the death penalty, I do not think the individual who has committed the crime should decide when, where or how they are able to serve their sentence. Knight, Berry and DeJesus never decided to be held captive for more than a decade, go through those traumatizing experiences and have half their lives taken away by a man who did not care whether they lived or died. They never had a choice, so it isn’t fair that their captor decided his own fate.
The least Castro could have done is apologize to the real victims of the tragedy and not turn this whole incident around on himself in an attempt to gain the public’s support. Suicide or not, no one deserves to die and no one should have to go through what those girls endured.
Opinion columnist Blake Mudd is a journalism freshman and may be reached at [email protected]
I really do understand where you are coming from. The families of the women that he tortured must be going through a world of hurt but don’t ignore all the signs that Castro was mentally ill. I’m not making any excuses for him but in order to torture someone or even a pet is a sense of desensitization towards life. Due to this you can’t and won’t ever get to a point where you as a sane individual understand or even half way understand his motifs behind what he did. As an individual the most important thing to you is to live life so just the action in taking his own life says it all. We just have to remember that all things have an equal reaction. Ball goes up it eventually comes down.
One question: Who are the real victims?