Cleveland: Women Missing For Decade Rescued

Cleveland: Women Missing For Decade Rescued


Cheering crowds greet the news that three women have been
found, apparently in good health, about a decade after they disappeared.


9:17am UK,
Tuesday 07 May 2013



Video: Amanda Berry (centre) in hospital
Pic: 19actionnews.com
Enlarge


Listen To Amanda Berry's 911 Call

Video: Listen To Amanda Berry's 911
Call
Enlarge

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
  
  
  
  
  Three women who disappeared separately about 10 years ago have
  been found alive in a house in Cleveland, Ohio - just a few miles from where
  they went missing.
  
  Police said they thought Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight had
  been tied up in the property and had been there since they vanished.
  
  The trio, who went missing in their teens or early 20s, have been taken to a
  hospital for checks and were being reunited with relatives.
  
  They have also been described as being in good health after being found in a
  residential area just south of the city.
  A poster with images of Amanda Berry
  on
  Three brothers were arrested. One of the men, a 52-year-old, lived at the
  home, and the others, ages 50 and 54, lived elsewhere.
  
  Ms Berry disappeared aged 16 on April 21, 2003, when she called her sister to
  say she was getting a lift home from her job at a Burger King.
  
  Ms DeJesus went missing aged 14 on her way home from school about a year
  after Ms Berry.
  
  The third woman, Ms Knight, had been missing since 2002 when she was believed
  to have been 20.
  
  Cheering crowds gathered on the street near the home where the women were
  found.
  Gina DeJesus went missing on her way home from
  school
  The long nightmare for the trio ended when Ms Berry reached her arm through a
  crack in the front door and called for help.
  
  Neighbour Charles Ramsay heard her screaming, tried to get her out through
  the door but could not pull it open.
  
  So he kicked the bottom open and she crawled through "carrying a little
  girl".
  
  Ms Berry went into a nearby home and called police.
  
  In a recording of the 911 call, she told the emergency dispatcher: "I'm
  Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped. I've been missing for 10 years. I'm free. I'm
  here now."
  Ms DeJesus' father wants a change in Amber
  Alert rules
  She said she had been taken by someone and begged for officers to arrive at
  the home on Cleveland's west side "before he gets back".
  
  When police arrived, she said two other women were being held captive.
  
  They were also rescued and police said a six-year-old also was found in the
  home, but the child's identity or relationship to anyone in the home was not
  revealed.
  
  Mr Ramsay told how he rescued Ms Berry. He said: "I hear this girl screaming
  and she's going nuts.
  
  "So I come outside and I know there's nobody supposed to be screaming next
  door to my house because there's no girl that lives in that house.
  Age-progressed images of Gina DeJesus (L) and
  Amanda Berry
  "When I came to the front door and looked at her she said: 'My name is Amanda
  Berry - please get me out of this house'."
  
  Kayla Rogers, a childhood friend of Ms DeJesus told The Plain Dealer
  newspaper: "I've been praying, never forgot about her, ever.
  
  "This is amazing. This is a celebration. I'm so happy. I just want to see her
  walk out of those doors so I can hug her."
  
  Ms Berry's cousin Tasheena Mitchell told the newspaper: "I'm going to hold
  her, and I'm going to squeeze her and I probably won't let her go."
  
  In January, a prison inmate was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison
  after admitting he provided a false burial tip in the disappearance of Ms
  Berry.
  
  Two men arrested for questioning in the disappearance of Ms DeJesus in 2004
  were released from the city jail in 2006 after officers did not find her body
  during a search of the men's house.
  
  No Amber Alert was issued the day Ms DeJesus failed to return home because no
  one witnessed her abduction.
  
  That angered her father, Felix DeJesus, who said in 2006 he believed the
  public will listen even if the alerts become routine.
  
  "The Amber Alert should work for any missing child," he said then.
  
  "It doesn't have to be an abduction. Whether it's an abduction or a runaway,
  a child needs to be found. We need to change this law."
  
  Cleveland police said then that the alerts must be reserved for cases in
  which danger is imminent and the public can be of help in locating the suspect
  and child.
  

I just caught the tail end of the latest news and two of the Brothers have been released without charge. There was a clip of the Brother accused walking with two Men which looked like the Police Station and he had a cloth held against his right cheek , he will have to be placed in solitary if he wants to live after what he has done.

A phsychiatrist has just been interviewed and says the trauma the 3 girls endured will take a very long time to overcome. there will be the question of each girl trying to relate to their Families after such a long absence. Since they were so young when abducted it will be very difficult for the Families also to relate to their daughters. There will also be the fear that the girls have endured so much over such a long time that the bonds between them will make them relate to each other, rather than their Families.

Ohio Kidnap: Accused Ariel Castro In Court


The 52-year-old former school bus driver was remanded on
bail of $2m per case when he appeared in court in Cleveland.


5:36pm UK,
Thursday 09 May 2013



Video: Ariel Castro Remanded on $2m
Bail
Enlarge
The three Castro brothers appearing in
court

• 
  
  
• 
  
  
• 
  
  
  
• 
  [email=?subject=Shared from Sky News: Ohio%20Kidnap%3A%20Accused%20Ariel%20Castro%20In%20Court&body=Shared from Sky News: Ohio%20Kidnap%3A%20Accused%20Ariel%20Castro%20In%20Court http://news.sky.com/story/1088822]Email[/email]
  

!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs");


window.___gcfg = {lang: 'en-GB'};

(function() {
var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true;
po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s);
})();



Ariel Castro has appeared in court in Cleveland charged with
kidnapping and raping three women missing for a decade.

The former school bus driver wore blue overalls and stood with his head bowed
as prosecutors outlined the charges against him.

Castro buried his head in his shirt as a lawyer described the "horrifying
ordeal" Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Ms Berry's six-year-old
daughter endured during their captivity.

The unemployed 52-year-old did not enter a plea and briefly filled out some
paperwork with his hands cuffed as the court set bail at $2m per case,
effectively ensuring he will remain behind bars.
The scene in a packed Cleveland Municipal
Court for the arraignment
His lawyer - a public defender - told the court that Castro is on
unemployment benefit and "to the best of my knowledge" has no convictions for
serious crimes.

Castro made a "premeditated, deliberate and depraved" decision to snatch
three women from the street and two of the victims endured their "horrifying
ordeal" for more than a decade, prosecutor Brian Murphy told the court.

He kidnapped the women "to be used in whatever self-serving, self-gratifying
way he saw fit", the court heard.

Mr Murphy said: "While in captivity they withstood repeated beatings, they
were bound, restrained, and they were sexually assaulted - basically never free
to leave this residence."
Castro confers with his lawyer during the
brief hearing
The prosecutor described Castro's home as "a prison" to the women and young
girl, before adding: "Today the situation's turned your honour, Mr Castro stands
before you a captive ... the women are free to resume their lives that were
interrupted."

Castro's brothers Pedro and Onil Castro are to be freed after they appeared
at the same Cleveland Municipal Court hearing on misdemeanour charges.

Castro's lawyer Kathleen DeMetz said she expects her client to be placed on
suicide watch and in a cell on his own when he returns to jail.

• Related
  

BBC News US ‏@BBCNewsUS3m
#Cleveland kidnapping prosecutor: “This child kidnapper operated a torture chamber and private prison in the heart of our city.”
Details

BBC News US ‏@BBCNewsUS10m
Prosecutor will pursue charges of kidnapping, rape, assault & attempted murder in #Cleveland missing women case http://bbc.in/10uNUg8
Details

And this gives Kate "hope"? FFS!

HE COULD BE SENTANCED TO DEATH.

Ohio kidnappings: 'I heard a banging noise. It was low-pitched, a
thump-thump'


As details of their life in captivity become clear, a friend of Ariel Castro
reveals how close he came to discovering the abducted women









Image 1 of 5
(Top Row) The Castro brothers (
Ariel, Onil and Pedro Castro) and the home of Ariel Castro being searched by the
FBI. (Bottom right, from left) Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus
were found alive a decade after going missing



Image 1 of 5
Law enforcement officers in
front of the house on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland Ohio Photo: EPA/DAVID MAXWELL



Image 1 of 5
From left: Michelle Knight,
Amanda Berry and Georgina DeJesus (Reuters)



Image 1 of 5
Ariel Castro during the court
hearing where he was held on $8 million bail Photo:
Reuters



Image 1 of 5
Neighbour Charles Ramsey speaks
to media near the home on the block of Seymour Avenue where three missing women
were rescued in Cleveland Photo: AP Photo/The Plain
Dealer, Scott Shaw












By Philip Sherwell, Cleveland,
Ohio

6:03PM BST 11 May 2013


Comment




It was an afternoon ritual for Ricky Sanchez and Ariel Castro, fellow bass
guitar enthusiasts and regulars with Latin bands on the music scene of northern
Ohio. The two men would play salsa in Castro’s ramshackle home amid the
perpetual mess of a living room where the windows were boarded up, the
semi‑darkness illuminated by the glow of a large plasma television screen.



Mr Sanchez had been visiting for years, always making an appointment as he
had learnt from experience that Castro never answered the door if he knocked
unannounced, even if he was sure his friend was home.


On this Thursday afternoon, 10 days ago in the working-class Cleveland
neighbourhood, however, there were two oddities – a strange thudding somewhere
in the house, and the brief appearance of a small girl.


Castro explained them away. But just four days later, those events made
terrible sense to Mr Sanchez when another band acquaintance called to tell him
to switch on the television immediately. To his horror, he discovered that he
had been playing music for more than a decade in the lair of a monster where
three young women were imprisoned, raped and tortured, and where a child had
been born.


Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were initially held captive in
a basement converted into a sound-proofed torture chamber equipped with chains
and ropes. In recent years, when Castro apparently believed the women were so
terrified that his control was complete, he moved them into two bedrooms on the
top floor.



Related Articles

• 
  Ariel Castro may face death penalty over
  miscarriages
  09 May 2013
  
• 
  Ariel Castro's daughter: 'I'm so, so sorry'
  
  09 May 2013
  
• 
  Ohio captive forced to deliver baby at
  Christmas
  09 May 2013
  
• 
  Police: Ohio victims held with ropes and
  chains
  08 May 2013
  
• 
  Kidnap victim's mother looks forward to
  reunion
  08 May 2013
  

In a sickening twist, friends of the DeJesus family told The Sunday Telegraph
that Castro would play music at vigils for Gina, dedicating the songs to her and
Miss Berry and hugging Gina’s mother. He also joined searches and handed out
fliers for Gina, who was his daughter Arlene’s classmate and best friend when
she vanished at the age of 14 in 2004.

Yet his warped behaviour did not end there. Not only did he rob the women of
a decade of their lives, he also tormented them by making them watch television
news coverage of their cases. He even gave Miss DeJesus, now 23, one of the
fliers pleading for information about her whereabouts. She would go to sleep
looking at the beaming image of her teenage self. The father-of-four and
grandfather-of-five was their keeper, controller and torturer, but also the
predator upon whose whims, wishes and moods they depended.

These women, Mr Sanchez now knows, were just a few feet above his head when
he made his last visit to the house. In retrospect, there were clues that day,
but they seemed strange rather than sinister at the time.

“I’d been there about 45 minutes when a little girl walked into the room from
the corridor from the kitchen at the back of the house,” he said. “I was a
regular visitor in that house and I’d never seen her before.”

A strange fixed grin spread across Castro’s face, he said. “He asked me,
'Ricky, have you met my granddaughter?’ as he took her hand and led her out of
the room,” Mr Sanchez recalled. “That’s strange, I thought, I know his kids and
was sure I knew all his grandkids, but I had never seen her before.”

Then, as Castro came back into the front room, Mr Sanchez heard a banging
noise. “It was low-pitched, a thump-thump,” he said. “I couldn’t tell where it
was coming from in that old house and Ariel just said it was his dog upstairs
and he turned the music up.

“I have to say the guy was a demon but he played it real cool. It was the
first time that I heard any noise.”

Like many family and friends who knew Castro, Mr Sanchez can now, with
hindsight, identify a series of suspicious traits. There was the refusal to
answer the door to unexpected visitors; the volume he insisted on playing music
at when others were in the house; his insistence that he could never be away for
too long, certainly not overnight; his tendency to return home after his morning
run as a school bus driver with far too much fast food for a single man.

But at the time, they thought Castro was an eccentric if slovenly bachelor.
“He seemed a cool guy, he was always laughing and playing around, although his
place was disgusting, piles of clothes and shoes and papers everywhere,” Mr
Sanchez said. “It needed a woman’s touch, to be honest.”

Indeed, Mr Sanchez said he never saw any evidence of a woman in the house. He
had been upstairs to the main bedroom once, about six years ago, which he said
was as untidy as downstairs, but he had never been into the basement, which was
down a set of stairs behind a door from the kitchen that was always locked.

“It’s just chilling to think that I was in there so often and I was so close
to these girls,” he said. “Yes, he was strange at times, but I never imagined
this.”

Castro has now been charged with rape and abduction, counts that would carry
life imprisonment. He could face the death penalty if he is charged with
allegedly forcing Miss Knight to miscarry the children with whom he impregnated
her by starving and punching her.

Miss Berry and Miss DeJesus went home last week to emotional reunions,
issuing pleas for privacy as they slowly readjust to freedom, going to sleep for
the first time in a decade hearing the voices and seeing the faces of their
loved ones, not of Castro. But for Miss Knight, the story is more complicated.
She was discharged from hospital on Friday, but did not go back to her troubled
family. “Gina’s family have told Michelle that they will give her a home if she
needs one,” a friend, Lupe Collins, told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday. “Those
three girls are all sisters now after what they went through.”

Miss DeJesus told her parents how happy she was to be sleeping in her old
bedroom and talked of the little things that others take for granted, like going
to the dentist for a check-up, having her hair done and buying make-up.

“She’s asking for ice‑cream and chicken sandwiches and she’s just very happy
to be back home and surrounded by her relatives,” Angel Arroyo, a local pastor
and family friend, told The Sunday Telegraph. “She looks great and is in amazing
shape when you consider what she’s been through. Her parents, too, are
transformed. They woke up on Tuesday morning as different people. They never
gave up hope, but this is still a miracle for them.”

That miracle began at about 5.50pm, when neighbours heard Miss Berry
frantically calling for help. Castro had gone out, apparently leaving the front
door unlocked, but the screen door on to the porch was still jammed shut.

Like so much of what happened inside his house of horrors, it is not clear
what was different that day, what gave the 27‑year-old the chance or the
strength to make her bid for freedom.

Praising her bravery, Ed Tomba, the city’s deputy police chief, said simply:
“For whatever reason, something must have clicked, and she saw an opportunity.
And she took the opportunity.”

It also appears, from accounts that the women gave investigators, that Miss
Knight and Miss DeJesus did not join that initial attempt to flee. They have
told police that Castro had tested them previously, pretending to go out and
leaving doors open, and then beat them if they even left the rooms where they
were lived.

Miss Berry was kept in one upstairs bedroom with her daughter, while the
other two women spent their lives together in another. The doors did not have
locks on them, or were not locked that day, and there was no physical impediment
to stop them leaving the rooms, yet it would seem that such was the control
Castro exerted – or believed that he exerted until that afternoon – that they
were too cowed and crushed to flee.

Charles Ramsey, a dishwasher at a downtown restaurant, was among the
neighbours who heard Miss Berry’s frantic pleas for help. He put down the
hamburger he was eating at home and ran across to the porch of Castro, a man
with whom he had eaten barbecued ribs and drunk beer as they listened to salsa
music in his garden.

“I heard screaming,” he recalled in a now world-famous interview. “I’m eating
my McDonald’s. I come outside. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of a
house.”

With other neighbours, they kicked in the lower part of the screen door and
Miss Berry scrambled out to freedom, pulling with her a small girl – later
identified as her daughter, Jocelyn, fathered by Castro and born over a
children’s pool in the basement.

Miss Berry’s terror that her captor would return was clear in her panicked
call to emergency services, logged at 5.52pm.

Although the dispatcher did not appear to register the name of a young woman
who had been the subject of intensive missing person’s case since her
disappearance in April 2003 on the eve of her 17th birthday, a patrol car was on
the scene within two minutes.

To the amazement of police, she said there were two other women in the house.
As the responding officers headed upstairs in the darkened house, they described
one set of eyes and then another appearing in their flashlights. The weeping
women threw themselves into the policemen’s arms.

“We might have Georgina DeJesus in the house,” an officer said over his
radio. Then: “We’ve found them. We also have a Michelle Knight.” That wording
was itself a telling indication of how Miss Knight was nowhere on the radar
screen of the authorities, who had treated the young woman as a runaway after
she disappeared in 2002.

Castro, who came to the US mainland from Puerto Rico as a boy with his
family, bought the house in 1992 for $12,000 and moved in with his common-law
wife, Grimilda Figueroa, and their four children.

She moved out after repeated violent beatings at his hands and died last
year. His adult children, who slept in the same rooms where he later kept his
prisoners, expressed their repulsion for him last week. He was “dead to them”,
his daughter Angie Gregg said.

Between 2002 and 2004, her father had lured his victims into his car on the
same stretch of busy road in west Cleveland with offers of lifts, but instead he
drove them the five miles to his two-storey home at 2207 Seymour Avenue.

The women were only allowed out of the house a handful of times, in wigs and
sunglasses and under orders to keep their heads down, when Castro shepherded
them to the garage in his back garden.

According to a police report seen by The Sunday Telegraph, he would sometimes
leave the home with Miss Berry’s daughter, who was never told the real names of
her mother’s fellow captives in case she blurted them out in front of others.


Police insisted that lurid accounts from neighbours of women being led around
the garden on dog leashes naked were inaccurate, as were claims that police had
been called to the house to investigate such reports.

The developments since Monday have been remarkable. But the unanswered
questions are still many. For instance, how had Castro carried this off alone,
as the women’s testimony has so far indicated that he did? His two brothers were
arrested with him, but police later said they had no links to the crimes.

How had neighbours, family and friends missed the clues? And did he impose an
unofficial hierarchy upon his victims?

Miss Knight, the first woman he snatched, was already a troubled young woman
from a broken home with psychological difficulties, and her toddler son had just
been removed by child services. While it is impossible to rank evil, it does
seem that she suffered the most grievous physical abuse at his hands. Most
horrendously, according to the police report, he starved her, then pummelled her
stomach to force her to miscarry on the five times she became pregnant.

By contrast, when he made Miss Berry pregnant, he was so determined that she
should give birth to the child that he ordered Miss Knight to act as midwife and
threatened to kill her if the baby did not survive.

With no medical assistance, it is perhaps no surprise that the newborn
stopped breathing just after her birth; Miss Knight gave her mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation to bring her back to life.

But, of course, the greatest unanswered question is why he did what he did.
That may never be known, though Castro delivered his own self-serving verdict in
a 2004 “suicide note” that he never acted upon and that was removed by
authorities last week in evidence.

He needed help for a sex addiction and had been abused as a child, he wrote
in a letter in which he even had the temerity to blame his victims for getting
into a car with a stranger.

Those victims, three young women and a child, escaped his twisted clutches
last week. There is an added poignancy to the fact that they arrived home in the
week of Mother’s Day in the US.

There seemed little immediate prospect that the ordeal would heal Miss
Knight’s rift with her mother, Barbara. But Miss DeJesus’s mother, Nancy Ruiz,
said she would be celebrating for the first time since 2003, the last Mother’s
Day before her daughter disappeared.

And for Amanda Berry, it will be the most bittersweet of days. Her own mother
died of a broken heart, according to relatives, while she was missing. Today,
however, she will spend her first Mother’s Day as a free woman with her own
daughter.

It is incredible to think how people can survive for so long in conditions of such horror and they manage to resume their lives when released.

How sad though that Michelle Knight's mother does not wish to be reunited with her daughter due to problems which existed at the time of her disappearance and should surely have been forgotten by now.

Poor wee Shannon Matthews refused to go back to her mother when found, the wee mite actually preferred to go back into foster care rather than go "home". I hope she's with a loving family now.

Not Born Yesterday wrote:It is incredible to think how people can survive for so long in conditions of such horror and they manage to resume their lives when released.

How sad though that Michelle Knight's mother does not wish to be reunited with her daughter due to problems which existed at the time of her disappearance and should surely have been forgotten by now.

NBY, I think once the euphoria of finding their Daughters has subsided, the three Families will have trouble bonding again. Ten years is a long time to make up and in particular for Amanda because she has a child by this Monster.I think I quoted a Psychiatrist saying he thinks the 3 girls will bond more than their Families.
I still can't believe they were captive in a built up area and nobody was aware for 10 years. He must have taped their mouths when he went out so they couldn't sceam ... B***ard.

Yes Panda I agree that there will be problems ahead too. I always remember the sad story of Steven Stayner who was abducted when he was 7 and not found till he was 14, so he could barely remember his own family; his life thereafter was equally fraught and came to a tragic end.

This is a link to the first part of a made for TV movie about his case.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0b88DflPuw

Not Born Yesterday wrote:Yes Panda I agree that there will be problems ahead too. I always remember the sad story of Steven Stayner who was abducted when he was 7 and not found till he was 14, so he could barely remember his own family; his life thereafter was equally fraught and came to a tragic end.

This is a link to the first part of a made for TV movie about his case.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0b88DflPuw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0b88DflPuw[/quote[/url]]

I watched this on TV NBY, yes, another tragic case and like the Girls, he was abused for years so had no sense of self.

Ohio Kidnap: Victims Ask For Privacy To Heal


The three women held captive for a decade say they will not
give media interviews until their suspected captor is tried in court.


5:56pm UK,
Sunday 12 May 2013

Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus were
rescued a week ago

Ariel castro is charged with rape and
kidnap

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  
  
  
  
  By Sky News US Team
  
  Three women rescued from an Ohio after being held there for
  nearly a decade are pleading for privacy.
  
  Statements released by Michelle Knight, 32, Amanda Berry, 27, and Gina
  DeJesus, 23, say they are happy to be home, but ask that they be left to heal
  and reconnect with family members in private.
  
  The women also say they are extremely grateful for the outpouring of support
  from the Cleveland community, police and family.
  
  Ms Knight became the last of the three to leave hospital when she was
  released on Friday.
  
  In the statements read on Sunday by attorney Jim Wooley, the women expressed
  their happiness at being free.
  The victims have been embraced by the
  community since being freed
  Ms Knight, who was the first to disappear, said: "Thank you to everyone for
  your support and good wishes. I am healthy, happy and safe and will reach out to
  family, friends and supporters in good time."
  
  Ms Berry added: "Thank you so much for everything you're doing and continue
  to do. I am so happy to be home with my family."
  
  And Ms DeJesus said: "I am so happy to be home, and I want to thank everybody
  for all your prayers. I just want time now to be with my family."
  
  Mr Wooley said the women will not grant media interviews until the criminal
  case against Castro is completed.
  
  "Give them the time, the space, and the privacy so that they can continue to
  get stronger," he said.
  Friends and family gathered at the DeJesus
  home as Gina returned
  All three victims remain in seclusion following their rescue on Monday from
  the home of suspected kidnapper Ariel Castro, 52.
  
  The Ohio attorney general said DNA tests show that Ariel Castro - a former
  school bus driver charged with kidnap and rape in the decade-long abduction
  ordeal - is the father of the 6-year-old girl who was born in captivity to Ms
  Berry.
  
  Berry gave birth in a plastic inflatable children's swimming pool on
  Christmas Day, 2006, authorities have said.
  
  Castro has been charged with kidnapping and rape, and is being held on $8m
  (£5.2m) bond.
  
  Prosecutors say they will pursue murder charges for allegedly forcing Ms
  Knight to miscarry several pregnancies.
  
  If convicted on murder charges, Castro could face the death penalty.
  
• Related Stories
  

HIS TWO BROTHERS HAVE REPUTIATED/DISASSOCIATED THEMSELVES FROM HIM.