Christian Castro, 23, was charged on Friday morning with continuous family violence and he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 5 years.
In court, it was said prosecutors dropped three other charges against Castro as part of the plea.
The charge filed on Friday replaced a domestic violence charge that was filed against Castro in 2016.
Castro was also previously charged with retaliation for threatening violence against the wife of a Lubbock Police officer. But the reason Castro became newsworthy in 2015 was that he was named as a “person of interest” for his involvement in the Mark Ysasaga case.
Ysasaga was 15 when he disappeared in 2012. His body was found in 2015 just to the south of Lubbock.
Castro was never charged in the Ysasaga case. Castro’s former roommate, Jose Angel Simental, was charged with murder in May of 2015 for the death of Ysasaga. But later, those charges were dropped, and he was later charged with tampering with evidence. Simental was sentenced to 7 years.
Ysasaga was shot and killed in the house where Simental and Castro lived together which was in the 3000 block of 27th Street.
In 2015, sources and social media statements indicated that Castro was paid a $10,000 Crime Line reward for telling police where to find Ysasaga’s body. Not only that, but charges of robbery and kidnapping against Castro were dropped when he told police where to find the body.
Also in 2015, public records showed that the Lubbock Police Department illegally deleted a police report concerning Castro rather than turn it over to EverythingLubbock.com in an open records request. The then-Police Chief, Roger Ellis, was demoted in August of 2015 and chose to retire rather than serve as a police captain.
“This guy has a history,” Barron Slack, Chief Prosecuting Attorney said on Friday. “But this plea agreement was based on the evidence in each case.”
“It has nothing to do with Mark Ysagaga or any of those other matters that have been reported on,” Slack said.
Slack also said, “Nothing to do with this plea agreement … was related to him giving any information or any consideration for helping in a case or anything like that. [Those are] completely separate matters.”
“But nothing affected this plea agreement other than communicating with the victims – their different levels of support and opinions about prosecuting him, information that we would have and evidence we would have,” Slack said.
Related Story: Castro, Person of Interest in Ysasaga Murder, Arrested for Shooting & Domestic Violence
