So, I see on CNN that the brothers of the kidnapper/rapist/murderer Ariel Castro were released and aren’t believed to have been directly involved in the crimes.
Now, since the girls are all alive and presumably giving accurate reports to the police I’m sure this is probably true. They didn’t kidnap, rape or see the girls in captivity. One could make a case that they may have had some knowledge about this or supported him from a distance, but for the sake of this question lets set that possibility aside. I trust we’ll learn more of the details in the coming days.
What I am wondering, are these guys responsible anyways? Shouldn’t there be some degree of accountability for people having a clue what’s going on in their family members lives? When that college student went on a shooting spree at Va Tech people blamed the parents for not knowing he was sick and not being watched closer. Ditto the guy in Arizona. Shouldn’t we get to a point where people should have some accountability for being ignorant of this stuff… it takes a village and all.
Apparently no one in the family knew and the guy was abusive so they didn’t ask questions about where they weren’t allowed to go and why there were padlocks on doors. The guy beat his children’s mother very severely. I can understand why his children would have been too scared to look too deeply into strange things that were going on.
As for the brothers, maybe they also just thought their brother was a huge weirdo?
If I knew some guy who had padlocked doors in his house my first thought would be drugs. Not kidnapped women. But you can’t very well call the cops on someone for having locked doors without anything else. If I heard noises that weren’t clearly human I would suspect animal abuse. Unfortunately that’s something many people ignore, especially if they’re afraid of who is doing it or if the police don’t take things like that seriously.
Willful ignorance is likely another aspect of this. Not that that excuses them, but if there was truly no reason to suspect that three women were hidden in the home, there’s no reason to hold anyone responsible accept Ariel Castro.
You can’t hold one adult responsible for another adult’s actions if he doesn’t have any control over that adult. If the brothers knew about it and didn’t report it, that would be one thing, but we can’t be expected to know what people in other households are doing. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where people in “the village” had a stake in prying into what happens in my house. That’s why we have guarantees in the Constitution against unreasonable search and seizure.
The brothers gave a CNN interview this weekend. Saying they knew nothing and would have called the cops if they did.
Several people have said in interviews that they visited the house. Each time the suspect insisted that they wait until he was ready for them to come in. Music would be playing loudly. Locks on basement door. Usually they sat only in the kitchen. Sadly no one ever asked any tough questions.
These questions come up often in these kinds of cases, but once you see how often people really do miss affairs, child sexual abuse, suicide etc, it’s not so surprising. Obviously sometimes its not wanting to know, but often its that our brain tends to fill in gaps or explain away discrepancies unless there are so many that the previous image of who the person seemed to be breaks down. And the person of course is often actively lying or trying to conceal it.
And then they get to beat themselves up over it with what becomes far more obvious in hindsight.
I missed the interview, but this is what gets me. I’m not suggesting the neighbors have a job to do when i comes to snooping, but if this guys brothers aren’t asking those tough questions it worries me that we’re a little too far on the wrong side of the spectrum. These actions scream for an explanation and this crosses into willful ignorance territory.
I get the slippery slope argument and all, but crazy people can’t be allowed to keep being crazy when it completely obvious they are crazy.
From what I’ve read (and the fact that BOTH brothers had warrants for drug and alcohol related charges) they’re addicts who probably weren’t in any position to dig too deeply into why their brother acted weird.
This case reminds me of the BTK story, in that nobody would have suspected him of being capable of anything like this, but certain elements of bizarre behavior were explained later.
What do you think would have happened if they’d asked tough questions? ‘Yeah, you got me, I’m a rapist and kidnapper. I’ll just sit here while you call the cops.’
Both brothers said in the CNN interview that they would have turned their brother in. Pedro said he had known the DeJusus girls father for years and was especially upset that she was taken.
They weren’t exactly pillars of the community but I think these guys would have done the right thing. Family honor is a big thing in the Hispanic community. This whole family feels the shame of their brother’s actions.
I’m not sure if that’s a reply to my post. Ok, they would have turned him in if they knew. ‘Asking tough questions’ doesn’t mean they would have known.
Family members usually have keys to each others houses. Or they know where a spare outside key is hidden. Dogs have to be fed, plants watered, and so on.
It wouldn’t be a problem if I needed to look around my brother’s house. Not that I’d ever suspect to find kidnapped women. Maybe a grow op in the basement. But only being allowed in the kitchen would raise my suspicions.
For every one kidnapper/rapist with padlocks and extreme “privacy” issues, there’s probably hundreds (or thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of harmless weirdoes with padlocks, privacy issues, and other quirks; I don’t believe anyone else is morally culpable at all unless they heard screams, saw a gagged woman in the window, saw their brother with a strange child, etc., and did nothing about it.
Looking at the house, as shown in overhead newschopper shots and in Google Earth, the house seems to sprawl over nearly all of its lot. The house looks like it’s been added to over the years, until now it sprawls over most of the lot. In most houses of any size, it’s not unusual for a visitor who sees only the front one or two rooms to remain unaware of what goes on several rooms away. So I wouldn’t expect the brothers to have known about it automatically, and the same would be true of any random visitor over the years who only saw a couple of rooms of the house.
Nobody has a key to my house but me-- I’m certainly not holding any hostages in my basement (I don’t even have a basement!). I don’t have plants that can’t be watered on automatic sprinklers and the dogs go to the kennel when I can’t take them. If I’m gone more than a few days, mail gets put on hold with the USPS. I travel a lot for work (a solid half of the month), but nobody has a key.
Anyway, I guess to me, that part isn’t all that unusual.