OMG how horrible.......
Police puzzled as to why Fort Worth man was beaten to death
Posted Monday, Mar. 29, 2010
FORT WORTH -- There are years of Larry "Gene" Casteel's life that are unknown to his family, times when the mentally challenged man would simply disappear.
"You just never knew when he might leave, and it might be months, it might be years before we'd hear from him," said his stepmother, Trish Casteel.
But in the last decade or so, Gene Casteel had stopped running, telling one family member that he had gotten too old to be living on the streets.
In May 2009, after years of living in Alabama, the 40-year-old man with childlike tendencies moved with his father, stepmother and sister to Mansfield. He got a janitorial job at Six Flags Over Texas. He dreamed of getting an apartment of his own.
But on July 15, 2009, after completing a job placement test at a Goodwill facility in southeast Fort Worth, Casteel vanished again.
Last month,
DNA tests confirmed that human remains found in September at an illegal dump site near downtown were his. Homicide detectives say he had been beaten to death with a heavy object, possibly a baseball bat, and are still trying to identify his killer.
"He was very trusting, and I think that probably got him into some trouble," Trish Casteel said.
Why someone would want to kill Casteel stymies investigators.
He was believed to have been carrying little or no cash when he disappeared. His wallet, which is still missing, contained a Social Security card and an inactivated debit card, neither of which has been used since his disappearance. His cellphone, which also has not been recovered, had not been used since his disappearance.
Homicide Detective Matt Barron said the lack of an obvious motive concerns him because Casteel may have been targeted merely because he was mentally challenged and homeless.
"What did they have to gain from killing [him]?" Barron said. "It was very obvious that he didn't function in the normal way, so that worries me greatly that someone just did it for sport."
A puzzling disappearance
What prompted Casteel to leave the Goodwill facility that July morning still puzzles his family.
Trish Casteel said she had dropped off her stepson so he could take a job placement test in hopes of getting a job at a Walgreen's warehouse. The test, which had psychological and IQ exams, was supposed to take six hours.
But Casteel finished early. Instead of waiting for his stepmother to pick him up as they had planned, he signed out and left the facility about 11:20 a.m.
When Trish Casteel arrived about 3:30 p.m., her stepson was nowhere to be found. She checked inside the Goodwill store and a nearby gas station. She drove up and down to Interstate 20, hoping she'd find him walking around, but to no avail.
Disappearing had been commonplace for Gene when he was younger.
"He would just kind of take off," Trish Casteel said. "I could drop him off at school in the morning and he'd go in the front door and out the back. It was almost like something would click. ... There was really no rhyme or reason to why it would happen."
http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/29/2075670/police-puzzled-as-to-why-fort.html#ixzz0op8MTtOP
