“48 Hours” 10 p.m. tomorrow on WCBS/Ch. 2
“48 Hours” checks in with a kid whose sad story the newsmagazine has been following for five years.
That’s a commitment rare in network news these days, but it’s a story that warrants it, a story that we hope against hope will have a happy ending.
Not just for a kid who as a toddler watched his mother take drugs and service men. But also for a society that is losing patience with the damage caused by broken homes and battered lives.
But there are only fleeting rainbows in the life of Juan Carlos Castro, who was born in Newark, N.J., to a drug-addicted hooker.
He was abandoned by age 6, sleeping in a car, which is how the system first came across him at age 8. What followed were several years in which Juan Carlos was in and out of foster situations (some 35 homes) and trouble (some 100 cars stolen, not to mention assorted other offenses).
In 1996, two years after “48 Hours” first starting tracking him, viewers met Juan and a handful of people who saw something in his sad eyes that made them want to find behind the tough-too-early facade a kid they could turn around.
But there is nothing anyone can do after Carlos was busted on a trip to Newark, incarcerated for 16 months and released with the clear understanding that if he screwed up any time in the next three years, he was going away for a long time.
This kid whose face lit up like Lou Diamond Phillips’ on the rare occasions we saw him smile, had a tear tattoed high on his left cheek.
“This is the saddest story I’ve ever worked on,” senior producer Katie Boyle tells The Post.
Juan Carlos must choose between pleading guilty to snatching the purse of a retiree, which will earn him 35 years in prison, or taking his chances on a trial and possibly going away for life.
A boot camp commander who knows Juan Carlos says he never had a chance.
The prosecutor thinks he’s already been given and blown too many chances.
So, either way, Juan Carlos, who says he has no one to blame but himself, is effectively going to prison forever.