Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-02 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Around 9 o’clock Monday night, this uniformed hotel employee came out of the Marriott Inner Harbor’s Whitecap Tavern and headed toward the Chesapeake Room across the lobby when a guy stepped in front of her.

“You work here, right?”

“Yes.”

“Terrible about the little kids, huh?”

No further identification was needed. On Saturday evening the three little children, ages 6, 4 and 2, were taken to a 10th-floor room here by their father, a fellow named Mark Castillo who has a history of emotional problems, now apparently out of his mind with rage over a custody battle with his wife, and one by one he took his children to a bathtub and held them under the water until all the life was out of them.

Then, in his lone understandable act of the hour, Castillo attempted to take one more life: his own. Police say he swallowed about a hundred Motrin pills and cut his neck with a steak knife. Then, with his children lying lifeless on the next bed, he went to sleep. And when he awakened and, against all indication there is a God who is watching and keeping score, he found himself still alive. So he called the front desk to tell them what he had done.

When the cops arrived, they found Castillo lying in bed facing an outside wall. The three children were found, in the stark, spare words of the police charging document, “lying naked and deceased.”

“Terrible, yes,” the young woman in the hotel lobby says now. “I was off when it happened.”

“How did you learn about it?”

“On the news,” she says. “And then the management called us in and told us.”

“What did everybody say?”

“Nothing,” she says. “They told us not to talk about it.”

The young lady laughs out loud and says nothing more as she moves away. If we laugh, maybe we get ourselves through the haunted hours. If we don’t talk about it, maybe we can pretend it never happened. On this Monday night, just hours after Castillo told police that he drowned his own children, life went on as merrily as possible in the place where murder was done.

Behind a check-in counter, a television set on a wall showed the Maryland women’s basketball team playing Stanford. This is what youth is all about. A speaker system pumped in a pretty lively jazz tune while customers in the hotel’s Whitecap Tavern watched the ballgame, drank beer, chatted with friends, worked on laptops, went about the business of getting through another night.

Pamphlets strewn about the lobby declared, “It’s Baseball Time Again! Opening Day buffet includes hot dogs with bun! Pit beef! Steak Fries!” This is what the good life is all about.

But it felt all wrong. It felt as if time should stand still here for a while, that respects should be paid, that mourners’ prayers should be heard instead of a basketball announcer’s cheery voice. And that maybe God himself, having had the murder of innocents slipped past him on the 10th floor, should leave some signal of his great sorrow where everyone could see it.

Now customers started coming out of the hotel tavern. They looked like stragglers left over from the afternoon’s Orioles opener. The ballpark’s a block down Eutaw Street. A uniformed female hotel employee strode past wearing an Orioles cap. The tavern customers had grim looks on their faces.

“Pretty awful, huh?”

“Awful,” one of them said. “They play like this all year, they won’t win 50 games.”

“No, no. About the kids.”

“Oh, the kids. Yeah.”

The kids were already slipping past the edges of memory. One guy gestured toward the tavern.

“I asked the barmaid about the kids,” he said. “She said, ‘We’re not supposed to talk about them. We’re just supposed to do business as usual.’ ”

And why not? For what is there to say, once you’ve said that a man has chosen to punish his wife by murdering their children? That it’s horrible? That it’s a reminder to treasure our children, and protect them in their vulnerability, and hope they grow up to watch ballgames just down the street from here? Aren’t those givens?

In the hotel gift shop, the cashier was asked about the three children.

“What children?” she asked.

“The killing.”

“What killing?” she said.

There’s our defense against such an incomprehensible act: Keep ourselves ignorant of all unpleasant facts. Have a beer, watch a ballgame. And life goes on.

Michael Olesker can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com