A Montgomery County judge granted partial custody to a man police say has admitted to murdering his three children even though he reportedly threatened to kill them more than a year before, according to court documents obtained by The Examiner.
Police say Mark Anthony Castillo drowned his three children in a bathtub in a 10th-floor room at the Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor. Then he stabbed himself in the neck with a steak knife and downed 100 Motrin pills to try to kill himself and passed out in a bed next to their corpses. Police say he then called the hotel’s front desk to confess what he had done.
“I know what I did was bad,” Castillo, 41, of Rockville, told paramedics when they entered his room, according to charging documents. “I did it. I drowned the kids last night around 6 p.m.”
Castillo has been charged with the first-degree murder of his sons, Anthony, 6, and Austin, 4, and daughter Athena, 2. In January 2007, Montgomery Circuit Judge Joseph Dugan ruled the father could see his children and that psychological analysis provided by court-appointed therapists showed no signs of acute danger, despite Castillo’s having been committed to a mental hospital in June 2007 for threatening to commit suicide. Just a month before that ruling, his wife said Castillo threatened to kill their children:
“… he did tell me that the worst thing he could do to me would be to kill the children and not me, so I could live without them,” Amy Castillo said in court documents referencing a December 2006 incident in which she claimed Castillo abducted one of the children.
Doctors said Castillo could become dangerous under stressful situations, but that he remained safe as long as he remained in therapy and took recommended medication.
Since November 2004, Castillo was an intermittent, part-time gymnastics instructor at the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s Fairland sports center in Laurel, a throwback to the period he spent in the 1990s as a member of a traveling trampoline act. At Fairland, Castillo spent as many as 20 hours a week training kids and was known to be friendly and great with kids by co-workers.
