BY MADELEINE DOUBEK
Daily Herald Projects Editor

Mike Bruning remembers pumping his bike pedals so hard alongside Michael Castro that he had the sensation they were flying.

Michael would push and push the two of them to keep going. Faster. Harder. Farther. They'd follow a trail near their houses to the Palatine Hills Golf Course and back. It was as if Bruning's silver Mongoose and Michael's red 10-speed had wings.

"We'd be like two birds just flying down the course," Bruning recalled. "He got me to do it. He instilled in me if he could do it, I could do it. I loved riding bikes with him."

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CASTRO FAMILY Michael Castro clowns with his dogs Brandy and Ziggy on his 15th birthday in 1991, left. He poses with sister Mary Jane at her 8th grade graduation in 1984, when Michael was 8.

Michael Castro's motivating spirit was smothered abruptly when he and six others were forced into a freezer and cooler at Brown's Chicken & Pasta in Palatine and shot to death on a frigid January night 10 years ago.

Michael lived just 16 years, but he soared through that brief time, enjoying life and striving to reach goals.

In many ways, he was a typical teen: He was captivated by Nintendo, and Atari before that. He loved cruising around in his pickup truck. He asked buddies to help him write love letters to girls. He enjoyed pulling pranks and making his pals laugh.

Yet friends and family also describe a teen who, far beyond his physical age, was motivated, attentive to others, thoughtful and empathetic.

Bob Fischer, a neighbor of the Castro family, said Michael always was gregarious; the kind of child who would help Fischer's wife with raking or other chores.

"He was the kind of young man you want your kids to associate with," Fischer said.

Michael played with Fischer's younger children and also befriended Bruning, who lived around the corner and was two years younger. He'd pick Bruning up at school when he got his truck, cheer him up when other children bullied or teased him and counsel him about the evils of playing with firecrackers or spraying walls with graf-fiti.

"I felt really, really special," Bruning said. "He's like my hero. He never stopped. He always kept pushing to get better, get better."

Michael had a whole lifetime planned for himself by the night he was murdered, shot several times and stabbed in the stomach.

He treated his first job seriously, planned to join the Marines and talked of eventually becoming an aeronautical engineer.

A decade removed from his brutal death, Castro's parents, Manny and Epifania Castro, still find it too painful to talk much to strangers about their youngest child. Manny did recall a time when Michael was about 13 and they attended a party with other Filipino-Americans. Young and middle-age attendees were letting loose on the dance floor while an elderly woman watched wist-fully from a chair.

Not for long.

Michael approached, asked her to dance and she beamed as they moved to the floor.

"That's one thing I can't for-get," Manny Castro said.

When Palatine police announced the arrests of two men charged with the Brown's murders, Lake Zurich resident Mary Jane Crow, Castro's older sister, had been finishing a scrapbook brimming with photos and handwritten memories of her baby brother.

There is Michael riding his "horse," also known as a canister vacuum cleaner. There is Michael practicing piano. There is Michael grinning in cap and gown at his grade school graduation from St. Theresa's school in Palatine and in a tuxedo as ring bearer for his parents' renewal of their wedding vows.

Michael Castro was a child of the 1980s. He liked "The Incredible Hulk," "CHiPs" and the "Star Wars" movies and toys.

One of Michael's earliest crushes on a girl came when he was in kindergarten at Lincoln Elementary School. As Valentine's Day neared, the little boy asked his mom to take him shopping. He picked out a card and a chocolate teddy bear for the girl. "It was the sweetest thing he did," Crow said, "and the great part is that he did it all on his own."

As they grew older, Mary Jane and Michael often hung out together playing video games or watching rented movies. Mostly, though, they talked and laughed.

The murder charges in the Brown's Chicken & Pasta case came days before what would've been Michael Crisostomo Castro's 26th birthday. A nice gift, Crow thought.

James "Jaybee" Anama befriended Michael when the two sat near each other in freshman gym class.

Both Filipino and neither particularly gifted athletes, they bonded quickly and often hung out with Anama's older brother, Anamite "Noel." Driving around once while he knew Noel was in back feeling ill, Michael stopped and started and jerked the truck around wildly for a laugh, Noel Anama said. Another time, before Jaybee Anama got his driver's license, Michael let him drive a block or two to take his girlfriend home and then began to laugh and laugh as the truck started to drift harmlessly toward the curb.

Self-conscious about his athletic abilities, Jaybee Anama said Michael "made the worst class for me a lot of fun. My popularity wasn't any more than anyone else's. He made me feel like I had at least one good friend."

Now Jaybee Anama is 26, married and has two children. Mary Jane Crow thinks about the lives her brother's friends lead and can only wonder about the future Michael should have been able to create.

Another of Michael's friends, Kurt Lewis, first met Michael in kindergarten when Michael walked up to him, looked down and remarked, "Big feet." Lewis replied, as 5-year-olds would, "Well, you have a bow tie."

As grade school pals at St. Theresa's, they'd horse around in the school hallways. After school, they worked on developing and de-signing a video game they were going to create. Lewis helped Michael with love letters to girls.

The night of their grade-school graduation dance, Lewis, a diabetic, said he became sick. At graduation the next day, Lewis was supposed to do a reading before the big audience but still was feeling shaky.

Michael "dragged me into the bathroom and cleaned me up and made sure I looked presentable," Lewis recalled. "The thing I remember most is that he kept calling over here that day to make sure I was OK. He was genuinely worried about me."

Unlike many teenagers, Michael was religious and unashamed of his spiritual beliefs, friends said.

He also was unusually aware of time. His friends say he talked about how his teenage years were speeding past.

He made Lewis make him a promise once about the future. Lewis frets he hasn't kept it well enough. Michael's words still haunt him.

"The last time I saw him that summer," Lewis said, "he got serious and said, 'I want you to promise me if something happens to me, I want you to keep coming around the house. Come around, see my parents. Promise me.'"