by John Glatt
* * *
As Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus finally came out of 2207 Seymour Avenue with blankets over their heads, half a dozen police squad cars converged on it from all over the West Side. They were taken straight to the ambulance, where Amanda and her daughter were waiting.
For the next twenty minutes, the three women tearfully poured out their stories in the back of the ambulance to the astonished police officers.
“They all started telling us how Ariel Castro was able to get them into his vehicle,” wrote Officer Johnson in her police report. “All three women victims stated that Ariel chained them up in the basement, but eventually he let them free from the chains, and let them live upstairs on the second floor.”
Michelle told the officers that Castro had made her pregnant at least five times during her incarceration, making her abort each time.
“She stated that he starved her for at least 2 weeks,” wrote Johnson, “then he repeatedly punched her in the stomach until she miscarried.”
Amanda was then asked about her daughter, Jocelyn.
“Amanda stated that she had the baby in the house,” read Johnson’s report. “They put a black plastic pool under her while she was delivering, so the mess was easier to clean up. Michelle delivered the baby [and] Ariel told her that if the baby died that he’d kill her; Michelle stated that Jocelyn, victim #4, stopped breathing at one point, but she breathed into her mouth and ‘breathed for her,’ to keep her alive.”
Amanda said that Ariel Castro was Jocelyn’s father, and the six-year-old had never seen a doctor or gone to a hospital, and neither had they since being abducted.
“Gina stated that Ariel had sex with her,” read the police report, “but she do [sic] not think she was ever pregnant; she said she ‘fainted’ once, but [do] not think she was pregnant.”
All three women said that Castro would keep the doors locked and not let them out, except occasionally into the backyard, when they had to wear wigs and sunglasses and keep their heads down.
“Amanda stated that Ariel would sometimes take Jocelyn out with him,” wrote Officer Johnson, “[but] Jocelyn did not know Michelle or Gina’s real names in case she said their names in public.”
Then Officer Johnson accompanied the four hostages in the ambulance to MetroHealth Hospital to be examined by doctors and be reunited with their families.
* * *
As the three women were telling their stories in the ambulance, FBI Special Agent Andrew Burke of the Violent Crimes Task Force arrived. He immediately began coordinating the investigation, soon to become one of the biggest Cleveland had ever seen. The multiagency task force comprised investigators from the FBI, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office, the Cleveland Police Department, as well as the local parole and housing authorities. The task force would work together over the next several months to investigate how Ariel Castro could possibly have snatched three women off the streets of Cleveland in broad daylight, keeping them in his private prison for so long.
Agent Burke arrived to find officers securing 2207 Seymour Avenue with yellow crime tape, having closed off the street several blocks on either side of Castro’s house. First he was taken to the ambulance, parked in front of 2207 Seymour Avenue.
“I’ll never forget it,” he recalled, “They opened the door and inside the ambulance [I immediately recognized] Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry. I did not have the familiarity with Michelle Knight, but I also noticed her as well as Amanda Berry’s daughter.”
After assuring the women they were in safe hands, Burke left to start setting up a chain of command and brief his team. He ordered search warrants for Ariel Castro’s home, vehicles, telephones and DNA to be executed immediately. Then he drafted in the FBI’s Evidence Response Team, who would be responsible for searching 2207 Seymour Avenue and gathering evidence.
He also ordered the Cleveland Sex Crimes/Child Abuse Unit to begin the delicate process of interviewing and medically testing the four victims, as well as informing their families they had been found and orchestrate the reunions.
“[We wanted] to return them to their loved ones in a safe manner,” explained Agent Burke. “[They needed] things as simple as clothing and shoes. We had to provide them with somewhere to stay.”
The experienced FBI agent knew that once the story broke, there would be an avalanche of media interest, and the women would need protection.
“So our attention was focused primarily on their safety and security at that point,” he said.
* * *
At around 6:30 P.M., the four victims arrived at MetroHealth Medical Center, less than a mile away from 2207 Seymour Avenue. They were rushed into the emergency room, to be examined by Dr. Gerald Maloney, the emergency physician on duty. It was the first time any of them had received any medical treatment since they had been taken.
“All three appeared emotionally distraught,” said Dr. Maloney, “but glad that they were free. They were cheerful [but] emotionally fragile at the time they arrived.”
Amanda, Michelle and Gina told the doctor how they’d been held against their will, and raped repeatedly over the long years of their imprisonment.
“Miss Knight in particular related that she’d been pregnant,” said the doctor, “and had been subject to both deprivation of food and physical assault to try and induce miscarriage.”
They all told the doctor they’d been physically assaulted by Ariel Castro, but Michelle, who weighed just eighty-four pounds and suffered from malnutrition, was in far worse medical condition than the others.
“Michelle had several bruises and appeared somewhat emaciated,” said Dr. Maloney. “[She] was very upset and actually preferred not to have a male physician or nurse in the room. After the initial evaluation, she had the rest of her care done by female nurses and a female resident physician.”
All the victims underwent rape-kit examination by a sexual assault nurse examiner, with the exception of Jocelyn. Then doctors took buccal swabs from Amanda and Jocelyn, so their DNA could be tested against Ariel Castro’s to prove he was the father.
“They related information regarding the sexual assaults to us,” said Dr. Maloney,” and also to the sexual assault nurse examiner. All three of them were raped vaginally … multiple repeated times. Again it was all against their will and they suffered physical harm while they were raped.”
While they were being examined and photographed, a nurse gave Michelle a Nutribar, which she ate ravenously. Then she nervously asked for another one, and the nurse told her she could have as many as she wanted.
“And she grabbed the nurse’s arm and hugged her,” said Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty, who was there, “and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’ It just showed what she’s been through. I said, ‘My God, this girl has been starved [and] she’s that grateful for such a small item.’”
Doctors found that Michelle’s jaw was badly injured, after being punched countless times by Castro, including once with a barbell. She had also suffered nerve damage in both arms from his beatings, and had a life-threatening bacterial infection, from eleven years of rotten food and starvation.
Her first meal in the hospital was a Steak ’n Shake cheeseburger and fries and a cheesecake Blizzard, which she later described as “going to heaven.”
That night at MetroHealth Medical Center, Officer Barbara Johnson remained with them all the time. She accompanied them to the restroom and waited outside, so they were never alone and always had someone with them.
During the hours she spent with them that night, she watched their reactions to finally being free.
“Amanda had [Jocelyn] so she seemed to be a little more grounded,” said Johnson, “as far as trying to protect her daughter and making it seem like everything was okay … [although] you know it … wasn’t. That was all she thought about. Michelle was still very frightened. She just held herself close.
“Gina was just confused by the whole thing, but a lot of the nurses and hospital staff
would come up and just give her a big hug, and say, ‘We’ve been praying for you, honey.’ And she just stood there with her arms at her side looking around.”
* * *
Around 7:00 P.M., Nancy Ruiz heard a rumor that her daughter Gina had been found alive in Ariel Castro’s house, along with Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight. She fell to the ground shouting, “Matalo,” meaning “kill him,” and rushed straight over to Seymour Avenue.
When Ed Tomba, Cleveland deputy chief of Homeland Security and Special Operations, arrived, Nancy ran up to him asking if it was true.
“It was a mob scene,” said Tomba, who had worked on Amanda’s and Gina’s missing-persons cases since the beginning. “Gina’s mom was screaming, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, Nancy. Come on.’ And I took her up to the house.”
Then an FBI agent showed Nancy a photograph of one of the girls who had been rescued, and she identified her as Gina.
One block away, Cesi Castro had been working in his Caribe bodega when he saw all the police cars and ambulances outside his nephew’s house, and came over to investigate.
“I thought somebody had got killed over there or something,” he said. “So I ran over there and I saw a cop going into the door and said, ‘Hey, that’s my nephew’s house! Is he there?’”
After finding out what had happened, Cesi began calling around the Castro family to tell them three girls had been found in Ariel’s house, and he and his brothers had been arrested. On hearing the news, Angie Gregg, who had dined there the night before, immediately went round to her grandmother’s house, where Detective Todd Staimpel was interviewing Lillian Rodriguez, who was in shock after Pedro’s arrest.
Angie told the detective that she visited her father’s house on average six or seven times a year, usually accompanied by her husband, Sam, and their two young sons. She said he always insisted she called ahead, and would make them wait outside for several minutes, until he appeared. Angie told the detective he kept a “barricade-style board” on the back door and always kept the back fence chained.
“He told Angie he was very cautious of burglars and wanted his privacy,” Detective Staimpel later wrote in his police report. “She described a sound bar receiver which was hooked up to the television. It had a ‘repeat’ mode and blasted away during the entire visits. She commented on the volume, at first, but then accepted that her father just liked keeping the music very loud.”
Angie said her father always kept the doors to the basement and bedrooms upstairs locked, and only allowed visitors into the downstairs living area. The only time she had ever been in the basement was when she was a little girl and had picked the lock and sneaked downstairs.
“She remembered a male mannequin and a porch type, two-seat swing,” he wrote. “She re-locked the basement door and her father never knew she’s been in the basement.”
Angie described her father as “violent and intimidating,” saying her mother had left him because of his physical abuse.
She also described how he had recently shown her a photo of a cute girl on his cell phone, saying it was the granddaughter of a friend. She had asked if it were her sister, as she bore such a close resemblance to Emily Castro.
At the end of the interview, Angie said that although at the time she had never questioned all the locks and loud music in the house, now it made sense.
“If my father was responsible for these crimes,” she said, “he must have led a double life.”
25
“DEAD GIVEAWAY”
At 7:02 Monday night—less than ninety minutes after Amanda Berry’s escape—the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Web site broke the story to the world.
“It had come across on the police scanners,” said Plain Dealer reporter Leila Atassi, “that they had found Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry and that this could be real. [They] were both very highly publicized missing-persons cases, widely accepted to have been abductions.”
When reporters saw that there was a third woman rescued, everyone in the newsroom wondered who she was.
“Who is Michelle Knight?” said Atassi. “That was the question we asked out loud. The first thing I did was [go] to the Cleveland police’s Web site of missing people … and Michelle Knight wasn’t even on the list.”
Then she sat down at her computer to write the first story on the dramatic escape.
BERRY, DEJESUS, KNIGHT FOUND ALIVE, POLICE SOURCE CONFIRMS, was the headline.
“We’ve confirmed it’s them,” she quoted an unnamed Cleveland detective as saying. “They are alive and safe.”
It had the barest facts, only describing how Amanda had “frantically told a dispatcher that she was alive and free after being kidnapped 10 years ago and held captive in a house on Seymour Avenue.” Police had arrested three brothers, ages fifty, fifty-two and fifty-four, but had not released their names yet.
Atassi’s story was immediately picked up by the wire services, and within hours would be making front-page headlines around the world.
The mayor of Cleveland, Frank Jackson, first learned they had been found after receiving a text from a city official.
“Alive?” he replied.
After receiving confirmation that they were, Mayor Jackson issued a press release.
“I am thankful that Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight have been found alive,” it read. “We have many unanswered questions regarding this case, and the investigation will be ongoing. Again, I am thankful that these three young ladies are found and alive.”
* * *
Across town, the FBI brought Gina’s parents and elder brother, Ricardo, to the MetroHealth Medical Center for an emotional reunion. When they walked into a conference room and saw Gina for the first time in nine years, they rushed into each other’s arms.
“We just grabbed each other and held on,” said Nancy. “There was no words. It was just hugging and kissing and crying.”
Ricardo DeJesus said Gina was noticeably thinner, but appeared in good health.
“I was very excited,” he said. “It was nine years. Nine long years and I was just happy to be able to sit there and hug her and say, ‘Yep, you’re finally home.’”
Amanda was also reunited with her sister, Beth Serrano, at the hospital, where they were photographed by nurses posing with a smiling Jocelyn.
But no one came to see Michelle Knight that night, and a victim’s advocate was summoned to the hospital to look after her.
* * *
By now, Detective Andrew Harasimchuk, of the Cleveland Divisional Police Sex Crimes/Child Abuse Unit, had been appointed the lead investigator in the case. He was briefed by Special Agent Burke and Deputy Tomba at 2207 Seymour Avenue, before heading to the MetroHealth Medical Center to interview the victims. There he was met by Detectives Laura Parker and Cynthia Adkins, who would conduct the highly sensitive interviews. After having all three women identify Ariel Castro from a photograph, the initial interviews began.
“They were very brief,” recalled Detective Harasimchuk. “It was a very chaotic excitement at the time at the hospital.”
While the three detectives interviewed the three women, hospital staff and close friends and family were constantly coming in and out.
Amanda told them how she had been walking home from work in her Burger King uniform on April 21, 2003, when she passed a van. Inside she saw a girl that she thought she recognized and a male driver. A few minutes later, she was talking to her sister, Beth, on her cell phone, when the van pulled up beside her. Then the driver asked if she needed a ride home.
Amanda told her sister she would call back, and spoke to the man driving the van. He introduced himself as Ariel Castro, asking if she knew his son, who used to work at Burger King, and his daughter Angie. Amanda recognized their names and she walked around the van, as Castro opened the front door for her.
Once inside, she realized that they were alone, and the girl she had seen was no longer there. When Amanda asked where she was, Castro said
Angie was back at his house.
Then Castro had driven past her street without stopping, but Amanda was not nervous, as she’d seen the girl with him earlier.
“When they got to the house on Seymour,” Detective Parker wrote in her police report, “he pulled into the back of the driveway and went into the house by the back door, leading into the kitchen.”
He told Amanda that Angie was taking a bath, and started showing her around the house. She followed him upstairs, going past a closed door with a hole where the handle had been removed. Amanda looked through and saw a woman inside, whom she would soon learn was Michelle Knight. When she asked Castro who it was, he said it was his roommate.
“Once they were upstairs in what was his bedroom,” Harasimchuk later testified, “Amanda Berry told Ariel Castro to please take her home or she would call the police. She attempted to run out of the room and became disorientated and ran into a closet.
“It was at this time that Ariel Castro first sexually assaulted her. He then used duct tape to tie her wrists and her legs. He put duct tape on her mouth and a motorcycle helmet on her head. He then carried her down to the basement where he physically restrained her with a chain. He left her overnight alone in the dark basement.”
Amanda then described giving birth to Jocelyn in the basement, assisted by Michelle Knight.
Next the detectives interviewed Gina DeJesus, who recounted her abduction. She was walking home from school with her best friend Arlene “Rosie” Castro, when they had telephoned her mother for permission for Gina to come over and play. Arlene’s mother had said no, as she was grounded.
“After that DeJesus and Rosie went in separate directions,” wrote Detective Harasimchuk in his report. “Rosie’s father, Ariel Castro, drove down the street and asked if DeJesus had seen his daughter. DeJesus stated that she had just seen her and then Castro asked if she would help him out.”
After Gina was inside his Jeep Cherokee, Castro informed her he had to stop off at his house to get some money.