<Body>BY BETH VELLIQUETTE
bvelliquette@heraldsun.com; 918-1042
HILLSBOROUGH -- After the jury watched hours of videotapes of Alvaro Castillo last week that presented a face of an apparently disturbed young man, on Tuesday his family and a teacher testified they knew him as a kind, intelligent and caring person.
Castillo, 21, is standing trial in Orange County Criminal Superior Court for the first-degree murder of his father, Rafael Castillo, 65, and for shooting at and wounding students at Orange High School on Aug. 30, 2006.
On the seventh day of testimony, Castillo's mother, Vicky Castillo, testified about her life with Rafael Castillo, calling it a nightmare.
Vicky Castillo recalled how shortly after she married Rafael Castillo she began having doubts about her marriage. Her husband flew into rages, had very strict beliefs about how to raise the children, including bathing them, even when they were babies, in cold water.
"I used to say, 'No, please don't ask me to do that because I can't,' " Vicky Castillo said.
Rafael Castillo would arrive home from work and often begin lecturing the children, working himself into a rage, and her mother and father would often argue about his philosophy of raising the children, said Castillo's sister, Victoria Castillo, 20.
Alvaro Castillo was afraid of his father and would often disappear into another room when his father was around, but as he grew older, instead of disappearing, he would greet his father when he came home from work and told him to sit down and relax.
Her son would often remove his father's work boots, then run to the kitchen and bring a tray of food to his father, she said. He served his father in an attempt to keep peace in the house, Vicky Castillo said.
But still her husband flew into rages. Vicky Castillo recalled that once when her husband threatened to hit her, her daughter, Victoria, slapped her father in the forehead. Her son, however, stood quietly in the corner.
Later Vicky Castillo chastised her son for not stepping in and protecting the family. She called him a coward, she said.
"You should stop dad from coming and hitting me," she testified she told her son. "Later on he got very sad about that and upset, I think."
Vicky Castillo also testified she often turned to her son for comfort.
"He put peace in my life when my husband never did," she said. "He was the hope for my future."
Instead of leaving her husband, Vicky Castillo believed her son would rescue her.
"I have this son, and he loves me, and of course he's going to help me and support my daughters and me," she testified.
But her son often turned to her with his problems.
"He used to tell me. 'Mom, I don't think I'm normal. Sometimes I look at you and I don't recognize you,' " Vicky Castillo quoted her son as saying.
Alvaro Castillo thought he needed medication but his mother was afraid because she had heard that sometimes when teenagers take anti-depressants they become suicidal. She suggested instead that he go to a therapist.
"Then he wouldn't say anything, and I didn't do anything, really," Vicky Castillo testified.
On April 20, 2006, her husband walked in as her son was preparing to commit suicide. They wrestled over a shotgun, which went off inside the house.
Her son was treated for a week at UNC Hospitals and given a prescription for an anti-depressant, she said.
Vicky Castillo also told the jurors why she accompanied her son on a trip to Colorado to see Columbine High School in June of 2006. She explained that her son was determined to go.
"I panicked really," she said. "I feel this is better that I go, and I take care of him."
She also thought that maybe once he saw the sights at Columbine it would satisfy his curiosity and overcome his obsession.
"In the long run, maybe this is going to be something good," she said. "That's honestly what I thought."
Castillo's mother also testified that she found firearms when she was flipping her son's mattress. After discussing it with her husband, they confronted Alvaro about the two guns.
"His first reaction like a little boy, that they take away a stuffed animal. 'No mom, no mom, please don't take it away. It's not loaded,' " she quoted her son as saying.
The three of them agreed that he could keep the firearms but couldn't keep the ammunition. She learned that her son often slept with the unloaded weapons.
"Once in a while, I was not very happy with the idea of Alvaro sleeping with a shotgun," she said. "I would go knock on the door to say good night, give him a kiss, and I saw the shotgun like a teddy bear for other kids."
Lee Gordon, a history teacher at Orange High School, testified he knew Castillo as a student in two of his history classes.
"Al was a model student," Gordon said. "He was very courteous, relatively quiet and reserved, but he was brilliant in the classroom."
Several hours after the shooting at the high school, Gordon said he learned that his former student was the one who fired the shots.
"I could not believe it was the same person I knew in school," Gordon said.
He watched some news clips of Castillo that night on TV, he said.
"Just the viciousness, the violent tendencies, the yelling," he said. "None of that I would ever associate with Al."
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