Andrew Welsh-Huggins
AP
July 13, 2013
The litany of charges against a Cleveland man outline in numbing detail the crimes his victims allegedly suffered over 10 years of imprisonment: August 2002, kidnapping. September 2004, kidnapping. November 2006, aggravated murder.
Christmas Day 2006, rape.
A new 977-count indictment filed Friday provides a painful look at what prosecutors say was a decade of captivity for three women in suspect Ariel Castro’s home in a rough Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood. Among the most serious charges: that he caused the death of one of his victims’ fetuses by punching and starving her.
Among the most haunting: that he assaulted the women throughout their captivity, causing psychological harm to them and to the daughter he fathered with one of them through assault. And in another newly unveiled accusation, the indictment also alleges that on the same day that the child was born, Christmas of 2006, Castro raped one of the other women, who had helped deliver the baby.
“Today’s indictment moves us closer to resolution of this gruesome case,” Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty said in a statement.
Castro, 53, is accused of kidnapping the three women and holding them captive – sometimes restrained in chains – along with the 6-year-old girl he fathered.
He is charged with two counts of aggravated murder related to one act, saying he purposely caused the unlawful termination of the pregnancy of one of the women. The new, 576-page indictment also charges him with 512 counts of kidnapping, 446 counts of rape, seven counts of gross sexual imposition, six counts of felonious assault, three counts of child endangerment and one count of possessing criminal tools.