Ariel Castro kidnapped and raped his three young captives on his own, police alleged last night, as they released his two brothers without charge.
“He ran the show,” said Ed Tomba, the deputy chief of Cleveland police. “He was the big bully. He acted alone, and these guys had nothing to do with it.” Mr Tomba blamed the “chaos” during Ariel Castro’s arrest on Monday evening for the fact that his brothers, Pedro and Onil, were also arrested.
“We found no facts to link them to the crime,” he conceded, amid sharp questioning of the decision to take the brothers into custody.
Mr Tomba also defended his officers’ past inquiries after it emerged that Ariel Castro resembled a suspect’s sketch that the FBI have held for more than seven years.
Agents searching the city for Georgina DeJesus, who this week escaped from Mr. Castro’s house, released a drawing of a “person of interest” in her disappearance in November 2005.
The man in the sketch was “Latino, 25 to 35 years of age, 5 feet 10 inches, 165 to 185 pounds, with green eyes, a goatee and possibly a pencil-thin beard.”
Mr. Castro, whose daughter Arlene was Miss DeJesus’ best friend, was 43 at the time. He is 5’8” and weighs 180 pounds, according to court records. He has a goatee beard but has brown eyes.
“Ariel wasn’t investigated at all,” said Frank Caraballo, his former brother-in-law. “Why was Arlene’s actual father out of the picture? He’s the bus driver, he knows where all these kids go.” Miss DeJesus was last been seen by Arlene, the youngest daughter of Ariel Castro and Grimilda Figueroa, walking home from school on the afternoon of April 2, 2004.
While Mr Castro was ignored by investigators, the then-boyfriend of his ex-wife was interrogated by the FBI over the disappearance.
Fernando Colon, a stepfather figure to Arlene, became the focus of the inquiry and was intensively interviewed, followed by officers and made to give DNA samples.
Mr. Colon, 49, said he told the FBI that Mr. Castro was a more likely culprit, but was ignored.
Mr. Colon had been convicted of molesting two of Ms. Figueroa’s daughters, in a case that he claims was driven by Mr. Castro, who testified against him.
“He’s got these girls prisoner in there, and put an accusation as such to me, makes him look like an angel, like he is such a proud father, such a trustworthy person,” Mr. Colon told local news.
Chris Gianni, an investigator who worked on Mr. Colon’s defence team, said: “They should have checked out his house and talked to him, and interviewed him, and thought about something.”
SEE ALSO: Cleveland Suspect Ariel Castro Charged With Kidnapping And Rape
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