VIENNA, Va. -- On a stage before nearly a thousand mourners, the violinists played notes of elegant sorrow.
Dr. Amy Ashley Castillo would normally have played alongside them.
Last evening though, she sat below in an auditorium at McLean Bible Church, where she and the community mourned the lost lives of her children: Anthony Nathaniel, 6; Austin Robert, 4; and Athena Faye, 2.
A week ago, their father, Mark A. Castillo, 41, said he drowned them in the bathtub of a hotel room at Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Mark Castillo, who told police a divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife had propelled him to kill his children, is charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
The children's deaths have drawn attention to what critics call a flawed legal system. Judges in Montgomery County had denied requests by Amy Castillo, a 42-year-old Silver Spring pediatrician, for a protective order and an end to visitation rights for Mark Castillo.
But there was no mention of him yesterday, as song and poetry filled the hall.
The Rev. Ezekiel Wharton, an administrator of the Forcey Christian School, which the two boys attended, spoke of holding on to faith, even in this excruciating moment. He encouraged the crowd to stand and show their support for the wounded mother.
"Amy, look around. Look around here," Wharton said. "We will not forget about you, and be there for you, however you need us, because we love you."
The minister's wife, Cheryl Wharton, who has comforted Amy Castillo in the days since the deaths, read a poem titled "God's Three Little Angels," written by Janine Castillo, who is Mark Castillo's grown daughter from a previous marriage.
With the end of the funeral services, attention will once again turn to the legal system as it deals with Castillo, who is charged with drowning the children, laying their bodies on a bed and attempting suicide - swallowing 100 Motrin pills and cutting himself in the neck with a steak knife.
Castillo awoke the next afternoon and called the hotel's front desk, police said.
"I know what I did was bad," Castillo told medics who arrived at the Marriott hotel at the Inner Harbor minutes later, according to charging documents. "I did it. I drowned the kids last night around 6."
The couple's stormy relationship began in South Carolina, where the newly minted doctor met the trampoline and gymnastics performer who would become her husband in 1998.
