The Child Protection eNewsletter

Man drowns three kids in Baltimore hotel room…

A man killed his three young children at a downtown hotel room, then called the front desk to report their deaths, authorities said. Read More

Police officers who responded to the 10th-floor room at the Baltimore Marriott Inner Harbor at Camden Yards found the three children's bodies and Mark Castillo, 41, with minor cuts that appeared to have been self-inflicted, police spokesman Sterling Clifford said. He did know how the children were killed.

"Why he brought them here to do this is something we don't know yet," Clifford said. Police identified the children as Anthony, 6, Austin, 4, and Athena, 2.

At a news conference, Baltimore City police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld said, "We believe the children were drowned, one at a time in the tub." Read More

Police charged Mark Castillo, 41, with 15 charges including three counts of first-degree murder and six counts of child abuse. He was charged after his release from a hospital where he was treated for self-inflicted cuts to his neck, police said.

According to charging documents, Castillo told police he drowned the children about 6 p.m. Saturday, then stabbed himself in the neck several times with a steak knife. He also took about 100 Motrin pain reliever pills in an attempt to commit suicide, but woke up Sunday at 1 p.m., when he made the call to the front desk.

Police did not cite a motive. Read More But Castillo's wife wrote in court documents that her husband had threatened to make her suffer by killing the children. She sought a protective order December 25, 2006, and asked that the court order Castillo to receive counseling.

"He has never actually hurt [the children], but did tell me that the worst thing he could do to me would be to kill the children and not me so I could live without them," she wrote in the petition. She also wrote that when her husband took the children for visits, he would not tell her where they were staying.

A temporary protective order was approved three days after the petition was filed, but Circuit Judge Joseph Dugan rejected a permanent order January 10, 2007. In explaining his decision, Dugan wrote there was "no clear or convincing evidence that the alleged acts of abuse occurred."

Girl talks about fake MySpace page that led to Megan Meier’s suicide…

In an exclusive interview with "Good Morning America," Ashley Grills, 19, admitted she was part of a scheme to create a fake persona on MySpace and start an online romance with a 13-year-old neighbor, Megan Meier. Read More Grills insisted, though, that she was not the only adult involved in the cruel hoax, which eventually led the emotionally vulnerable Meier to commit suicide in October 2006, after her spurious online boyfriend and others began making nasty comments about her.

Grills has testified to a grand jury that Lori Drew, the 47-year-old mother of one of Meier's friends, was actively involved in creating the account and wrote some of the messages to Meier--a charge that Drew and her attorney deny.

"We were just combining ideas about how we can figure out what Megan was saying about Lori's daughter," Grills told ABC News' Deborah Roberts. "It was all three of us-- me and Lori and her daughter."

Drew was never charged with a crime in Missouri, where Meier ended her life. See vol5_iss79 and vol5_iss76.

Now, in a strange twist, the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles has begun its own investigation to charge Drew with fraud. In this case, the alleged victim is not Megan Meier but MySpace, which is based in Beverly Hills, California. Grills has been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony against Drew.

Drew has said that Grills was the main instigator behind creating the fictional "Josh Evans" and striking up an online relationship with Meier.

Grills admitted for the first time publicly that she created the profile of Josh Evans, and she told Roberts that she wrote the cruel words, "the world would be a better place without you," that may have pushed Meier over the edge.

Grills said that she was trying to end the "relationship" because she felt that the joke had gone too far. "I was trying to get her angry so she would leave him alone and I could get rid of the whole MySpace," Grills said.

In other news…

A former kindergarten teacher for the Florence Unified School District in Arizona has pleaded guilty to two felony counts for having sex with a 16-year-old boy who fathered her child. Read More Queen Creek resident Angela Csader, 25, will be sentenced on April 28 after entering the plea this week. Both charges of sexual conduct with a minor carry a maximum sentence of 1.5 years in prison. She would also be required to register as a sex offender. Csader taught at the Florence district for about a year after police began investigating her for liaisons with a Gilbert boy whose family hired her to tutor their younger son, who is autistic. Reports show she began having sex with the boy in August 2006.

Alabama's child welfare system has made tremendous improvements, and no more federal oversight is necessary after a 20-year transformation from national embarrassment to national model, a federal appeals court said. Read More The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld an order by U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent to end Alabama's landmark child welfare litigation. Attorneys sued the state in 1988 on behalf of an 8-year-old boy who was removed from a home because of neglect and who became emblematic of the failed system. Too few workers and too much turnover caused long delays with investigations of abuse and neglect, and foster children were moved around the state wherever a bed was available.

Federal agents have charged the global patent director of Pfizer Inc. with receiving, distributing and possessing child pornography. Read More Alan Hesketh, of Stonington, Connecticut, is accused of posing as a 28-year-old woman while trading hundreds of images of children engaged in sex acts. He allegedly traded the images with a Buffalo, New York, man while chatting online between June 2006 and May 2007. Pfizer spokeswoman Liz Power said that Hesketh, whose office is in New London, is on a leave of absence from the company. He is being held without bond. Federal agents said the 61-year-old Hesketh signed on to the Internet from his home in Stonington and other Internet addresses, including one registered to Pfizer in New York and another at the Tudor Hotel at the United Nations where he was a guest for three days in December. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Hesketh at JFK International Airport in New York on Wednesday. Hesketh is a British citizen and a permanent resident of the United States where he has lived since 2002.

The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) is a new application, accessed via Facebook or mobile phone, which could bring an end to frantic “Where r u?” text messages. Read More The service, popular in Scandinavia, promises to provide users with a detailed map of their friends’ locations, any time and anywhere. However, there are fears that Sniff could be abused by employers to remove the last vestiges of privacy from staff. Useful Networks, the American company behind Sniff, promised that only consumers who gave their permission could be electronically tracked by the service, which operates across all mobile carriers. Users can specify who can and can not sniff them, or whether they are open to be sniffed by anyone on the network.

Seventeen of the nation's 50 largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent, with the lowest graduation rates reported in Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland, according to a report released Tuesday. Read More The report, issued by America's Promise Alliance, found that about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation's largest cities receive diplomas. Students in suburban and rural public high schools were more likely to graduate than their counterparts in urban public high schools, the researchers said. Nationally, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate on time with a regular diploma and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. "When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it's more than a problem, it's a catastrophe," said former Secretary of State Colin Powell, founding chair of the alliance.

Newsweek takes a look at the young opium brides of Afghanistan. Read More Afghans disparagingly call them "loan brides"--daughters given in marriage by fathers who have no other way out of debt. The practice began with the dowry a bridegroom's family traditionally pays to the bride's father in tribal Pashtun society. These days the amount ranges from $3,000 or so in poorer places like Laghman and Nangarhar to $8,000 or more in Helmand, Afghanistan's No. 1 opium-growing province. For a desperate farmer, that bride price can be salvation--but at a cruel cost. Among the Pashtun, debt marriage puts a lasting stain on the honor of the bride and her family. It brings shame on the country, too. President Hamid Karzai recently told the nation: "I call on the people [not to] give their daughters for money; they shouldn't give them to old men, and they shouldn't give them in forced marriages." All the same, local farmers say a man can get killed for failing to repay a loan. No one knows how many debt weddings take place in Afghanistan, where 93 percent of the world's heroin and other opiates originate. But Afghans say the number of loan brides keeps rising as poppy-eradication efforts push more farmers into default. "This will be our darkest year since 2000," says Baz Mohammad, 65, a white-bearded former opium farmer in Nangarhar. "Even more daughters will be sold this year." The old man lives with the anguish of selling his own 13-year-old daughter in 2000, after Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar banned poppy growing.

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