A Yonkers mother and her daughter recounted their creepy encounter a decade ago with Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man charged with kidnapping a trio of women and holding them as sex slaves.
“It’s awful,” Daisy Cortes told the Daily News on Thursday. “My daughter could have been a victim.”
Cortes said that back then she was an anchorwoman at a Spanish-language TV station in Cleveland and knew Castro through her then-fiancé, Robert Ocasio, who led a band called the Latin Jazz Project.
Castro, who played bass in the group, was on a setbreak during an outdoor concert one day when he first laid his hands on Cortes’ daughter, Bianca Cruz, then just 9 years-old, she said.
“He was touching her hair,” she said. “He looked like a nice person, the kind of people who smiles with his eyes.”
Cortes, 45, recalled how she and Castro had been talking about the big news story that had riveted Cleveland — the abductions of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, who disappeared in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
Castro, who is also accused of abducting Michelle Knight in 2002, gave no inkling that the missing women they were discussing were chained up in the basement of his home on Seymour Ave. in Cleveland.
And Bianca, now 19, said she didn’t think anything of Castro stroking her hair.
“I didn’t think he was doing it in a bad way back then,” she said. “In the Hispanic culture it’s normal to touch someone’s hair.”
Read more: nydailynews
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