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What drives parents to kill?
Motives for harming children are often unclear, experts say.
Whatever drove a 41-year-old Rockville USA, man to apparently kill his three young children in an Inner Harbor hotel last weekend might never be fully understood.
But the explanation police say Mark Castillo offered them - that he wanted to punish his estranged wife - is typical in cases of men killing their children, experts say.
"Most of the time, when men kill children, it's to get back at the women, sort of out of vengeance," said Dr. Neil Blumberg, a longtime forensic psychiatrist in Baltimore who has testified for the defense and prosecution. "Usually they're depressed, they're angry, but this is the way they can hurt their children's mother."
At least three other cases in Maryland over the past year appear to fit this profile: four children killed in a Frederick County townhouse last April; two boys and a girl shot to death in November in a Montgomery County park; and a toddler tossed off a Baltimore County bridge in February.
Though men who kill their children may have an underlying personality disorder, they are usually sufficiently in touch with reality to understand what they are doing, Blumberg said.
Castillo's three young children - Anthony, 6, Austin, 4 and Athena, 2 - were found in a room at the Marriott Hotel near Camden Yards on Saturday.
Castillo later told police that he drowned the children in a bathtub in response to a bitter custody battle with his wife, Dr. Amy Castillo, according to court documents. The documents said he told police he had trouble with authority and had been diagnosed with narcissistic personalty disorder, a condition that can cause a person to become preoccupied with himself.
On Christmas Day 2006, Amy Castillo alleged in court papers, her husband had threatened to kill their three children as a way of punishing her. The act would leave her alone in the world, she wrote in papers seeking a protective order.
Castillo, who unsuccessfully attempted to kill himself after the children were killed, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder and a dozen related charges, including child abuse and assault. He is being held without bail at the Division of Corrections medical facility in downtown Baltimore and was ordered yesterday to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
Though they tend to capture headlines, killings of children by their parents are uncommon. According to FBI data for 2006, the most recent data available, 462 of the 14,990 homicides for which an offender was identified fell into this category. Perpetrators are split evenly among men and women.
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