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| “ | I took her clothes off. I don't know, I thought she liked me. You know the rest. | „ |
| ~ Castillo confessing to raping Malika Richardson |
Jesse Castillo is the main antagonist of the Law & Order episode "Monster". He is a pedophile who rapes a 10-year-old girl and poisons her with roach spray, putting her into a permanent coma.
He was portrayed by Paul Calderon.
Early life[]
Castillo works as a superintendent in an apartment building in Harlem. Unbeknownst to his tenants, he is a pedophile who preys on prepubescent girls, often loitering around schools and the children's section of the local library. He was arrested for sexual assault in Virginia, but he was not convicted.
Shortly before the events of the episode, he becomes obsessed with 10-year-old Malika Richardson, who lives with her mother in the building next door. He follows her as she walks home from school and offers to buy her a slice of pizza. He then talks her into following him into the boiler room of his building, where he rapes her. When she threatens to tell her mother, he takes a can of roach spray from his toolbox and empties it into her mouth, putting her in a coma.
"Monster"[]
When Malika's neighbors find her and call the police, NYPD Homicide Detectives Lennie Briscoe and Rey Curtis question Castillo, who says that he was meeting with a repairman to fix the boiler at the time of the assault. Later, when Briscoe and Curtis detain a suspect, sex offender Owen Stokes, Castillo says that he saw him with Malika outside the building. The detectives, facing political pressure to get a conviction as quickly as possible, scare Stokes into making a confession by threatening to put him in the general population of Rikers Island and identify him as a pedophile, which would all but certainly get him killed.
Eventually, however, Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy and Assistant District Attorney Jamie Ross find out that Stokes had been at a clinic taking chemical castration medication at the time of the rape. They also review Castillo's witness statement and find that he could not have seen Stokes with Malika at the time he supplied to the police. Briscoe and Curtis question the repairman, who says that Castillo disappeared for 30 minutes while he was fixing the boiler. Briscoe and Curtis find the roach spray used to incapacitate Malika behind the boiler with Castillo's fingerprints on it and arrest him.
Castillo pleads not guilty to attempted murder and first-degree rape. Judge Gary Feldman - who also happens to be District Attorney Adam Schiff's opponent in an upcoming election - has the case assigned to his court so he, not Schiff, would be the one to put Castillo in prison. To make matters worse, Briscoe and Curtis cannot find witnesses who remember seeing Castillo with Malika.
McCoy talks to Malika's doctor, who says that the girl is in a persistent vegetative state. McCoy persuades him to tell Castillo's lawyer that she has come out of her coma and has Ross add her name to his witness list. Castillo's lawyer tries to make a deal with McCoy in which he would plead guilty to first-degree rape in return for a reduced sentence, but McCoy refuses, saying that the best Castillo can get is 12 and a half to 25 years in prison. Castillo reluctantly agrees to the deal and admits to what he did to Malika. He is then taken to prison to begin serving his sentence.
Trivia[]
- Castillo is based on Patrick Sykes, who was convicted in 1997 of beating, raping, and pouring pest killer down the throat of a nine-year-old girl, rendering her permanently blind, paralyzed, and mute.
External links[]
- Jesse Castillo on the Law & Order Wiki
