The father of Lamar Odom's Late best friend has spoken out as the basketball star lies in a coma inside a Las Vegas hospital. Guillermo Castillo who lost his son Jamie Sangouthai in June as the result of a flesh-eating bacteria he caught through intravenous drug use said he thinks Lamar and Jamie had a 'death wish.' "I think Lamar is done. I think most of it is because he missed my son so much. I think deep inside they had a death wish, or a wish to die together. It sounds very cold-blooded, but I have a hard time controlling my emotions," grieving dad Guillermo Castillo in emotional phone interview with Daily News.
They were so close. They wouldn't even go to the bathroom without asking the other. They couldn't live without each other," he said. "They went through a lot together very powerful and beautiful times together. Lamar called me and said he was sorry. I told him, 'I'm a street kid, walk the F away from everything right now because Hollywood is going to eat you up and spit you out too.' But he had money and status. Why would he listen to me?" Castillo said.
The restaurant manager said he wished someone would have forced Odom into therapy or rehab at any cost. He stopped short of blaming any one person, and even said he understood when Khloe Kardashian first broke things off with Odom in 2013.
"What could Khloe could do?" he said, referring to the couple's divorce. "She had a man every woman wanted to go to bed with." "I think she really loved him, and I don't think she could have done any other thing," he said "But I'm also sure, 200 percent, that everybody saw the signs that Lamar needed serious help. Did anyone say, 'Hey Lamar, let's go to a rehab center. We're going to try to save you so you don't end up like Jamie.' Did anybody do that?" he asked. "Because how could you see Lamar and my son for two minutes and not see they were like one person?" he asked. "The signs were there, straight from A to Z. Did they choose to ignore the signs?"
Castillo said he had no way to reach the basketball star after the condolences call because he regularly changed his number.
He said it wouldn't surprise him if last Sunday night's rerun of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" contributed to Odom's apparent overdose. In the episode, Khloe gets a call from Odom related to Sangouthai's death.
"Absolutely," Castillo said when asked if he thought the rerun might have triggered something in Odom. My son and Lamar were like brothers. When Lamar's mother passed away, my son became his family. The mother of my son became like his mother," he said.
Odom's mom died from colon cancer when he was 12 years old.
He said his son and Odom forged their lifelong friendship while playing basketball together in Queens and were extremely loyal.
"They were very big athletes, and went on to be successful, but then they were getting into drugs here, there and all over," Castillo said.
Sangouthai got hooked on painkillers after a major surgery on his abdomen and battled heroin addiction, his dad said. The tragic Odom friend went to rehab about a year and a half ago, but it didn't stick, the grieving dad said.
"I said to my son, 'You're lost in life. You're 37 and extremely smart, so what is it going to take for you to walk away?'" he recalled. "I tried to talk to him, but he went back, and I knew that he wasn't going to get better. Then in June they found him on the street with an infection from dirty needles or bad heroin. The doctor told me to say goodbye because he only had a 5 percent chance of living," he said.
Sangouthai died in mid-June from the bacterial skin infection necrotizing fasciitis. Castillo said he hopes Odom avoids a similar fate. Castillo said he hopes the stories of Odom and his son deliver a warning to people.
"Drugs are drugs. They don't pardon anyone," he told The News. "The message I have is, I hope everybody takes a look at this and says no to drugs."
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