Ariel Castro was serving life plus a thousand years for holding three Cleveland women hostage in his home for a decade, repeatedly raping them and fathering a child by one of them.
The 53-year-old Castro was found dead in his cell Sept. 3 with a sheet wrapped around his neck, and his pants and underwear around his ankles. A report from the Ohio prisons department says it’s possible he was attempting auto-erotic asphyxiation – an act by which people achieve sexual satisfaction by briefly choking themselves into unconsciousness.
Officials say no suicide note was found, and multiple evaluations of Castro did not find a tendency toward suicide. But officials also say two prison guards didn’t do required checks on Castro, and that they falsified logs to show they had.
