Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (31 page)

Finally he gives the door a little pull. It doesn’t move.

“Help me! I’m Amanda Berry! I’ve been kidnapped for ten years! Help me!”

An older lady comes by on the sidewalk, sees what’s happening, and waves her finger at us, saying, “No, no, no.”

What? What is she doing?

She’s motioning for the guy on the porch to step away from me.

This can’t be happening. These people aren’t going to help me?

“Help me! Help me! I’m Amanda Berry!” I shout again.

I have never screamed so loud. I keep waving my arm.

The guy steps down off the porch. He’s walking away from me!

“No! No! No! Please help me!”

Joce is standing behind me, screaming and saying, “I want my daddy!” But if her father came back right now, he would kill me. Why is this guy leaving? Why won’t he help?

Now another guy has walked in front of the house, a tall black guy. He’s asking the old lady what’s going on. She tells him that I can’t be Amanda Berry, because Amanda Berry died years ago.

No! I’m right here. Who cares who I am? Can’t they help me?

The tall guy comes up on the porch and pulls on the door a couple of times.

“Oh, man, this thing is locked,” he says.

“Please,” I beg him. “Please help me!”

He looks closely at the door from top to bottom and then, noticing something, starts to kick at the bottom panel.

“Go ahead,” he tells me. “Finish kicking it out, Mama.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I’ve been trying to push the whole door open. But he’s right. Maybe I can just kick out this bottom panel. It’s just flimsy cheap aluminum.

“Go on, Mama!” he says.

Why doesn’t he kick it in for me? He’s just standing there watching me. Why won’t anybody help me? I start pounding at the panel with my sneakers, kicking and kicking until finally I smash out enough of it for me to squeeze through.

I crawl outside and then reach in and pull Joce out after me.

“I want my daddy!” she’s screaming. “Where’s Daddy?”

We’re out but we’re not safe.

“I need a phone!” I scream as loud as I can.

“Okay, okay,” the tall guy says. “I’ve got a phone in my house.”

He lives right next door and starts to run there. I’m right behind him, carrying Joce, who’s clinging to me and wailing.

He opens his front door, picks up his cell phone, and dials 911. I wait in the doorway and look around. It’s dark inside, spooky, with not much furniture. I’ve just escaped from one scary house, and am not taking Joce back inside another one, so I bolt back out onto the sidewalk.

A few people have gathered on a porch across the street to see what all the commotion is, so I run over there, still carrying Joce, who won’t stop screaming.

“Please,” I tell them. “I need a phone!”

I haven’t seen this woman before, but I don’t think she speaks much English. She doesn’t say anything, but she looks concerned. She hands me a phone and I dial 911, watching up and down the street for the blue Miata.

Finally a police operator picks up.

“Cleveland 911. Do you need police, fire—”

“Hello, police? Help me! I’m Amanda Berry!”

“Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”

“I need police!”

“Okay, and what’s going on there?”

“I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years, and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now!”

“Okay, and what’s your address?”

“2207 Seymour Avenue.”

“2207 Seymour. Looks like you’re calling me from 2210.”

“Huh?”

“Looks like you’re calling me from 2210.”

“I can’t hear you!”

“It looks like you are calling me from 2210 Seymour.”

“I’m across the street; I’m using the phone.”

“Okay, stay there with those neighbors. Talk to the police when they get there.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, talk to the police when they get there.”

“Okay. Hello?”

“Yeah, talk to the police when they get there.”

“Okay, are they on their way right now? I need them now!”

“We’re going to send them as soon as we get a car open.”

“No, I need them now before he gets back!”

“All right, we’re sending them, okay?”

“Okay, I mean, like . . .”

“Who’s the guy you’re trying—who’s the guy who went out?”

“Um, his name is Ariel Castro.”

“All right. How old is he?”

“He’s like fifty-two.”

“All right, and uh—”

“I’m Amanda Berry! I’ve been on the news for the last ten years!”

“Okay, I got that, dear. And, you say, what was his name again?”

“Uh, Ariel Castro.”

“And is he white, black, or Hispanic?”

“He’s Hispanic.”

“What’s he wearing?”

“I don’t know! ’Cause he’s not here right now! That’s why I ran away!”

“When he left, what was he wearing?”

“Who knows!”

“The police are on their way; talk to them when they get there.”

“Huh? I need—okay.”

“I told you they’re on their way; talk to them when they get there, okay?”

“All right, okay.”

“
Thank you.”

“Bye.”

Maybe three minutes pass before the first police car pulls up. Before it even stops I run over to it, yelling at the cop who’s driving, “I’m Amanda Berry!”

Two officers step out of the car, and one of them says into the radio that they found Amanda Berry.

“Is there anybody else inside?” he asks me, with a startled look on his face.

“Yes!” I shout. “There are two more girls in there!”

They look shocked and they start running toward the house.

“Wait! Can you please put us in the car or something, in case he comes back?” I’m terrified, and Joce is still out-of-control crying, so they tell us to sit in the back of the cruiser.

By now the whole street has begun filling up with police cars, and cops are running everywhere. Some of them are breaking the storm door open and going inside.

A cop comes to take me and Joce out of the police car and walks us over to an ambulance, and we sit inside.

There are so many cops here now. He can’t get to us anymore.

Gina

We hear sirens outside, but I don’t pay any attention. We’ve been hearing them for years, and they never come for us.

A couple of minutes pass, and then we hear somebody climbing the stairs.

“Shut this door!” I tell Michelle. “I think he’s coming for us.”

We’re terrified. We close the door and throw our weight against it. There’s no way we’re strong enough to keep him out, but we have to try. What is he going to do to us?

Somebody in the hall is shouting: “Cleveland police! Cleveland police!”

Michelle pushes the door open and runs through Amanda’s room and into the hallway. I hear her yelling, “You saved us! You saved us!”

I’m still hanging back, just out of sight inside Amanda’s room. Maybe they are fake cops. Maybe it’s just some of his friends in costumes.

I peek around the corner and see two cops in uniform, a man and a woman.

Michelle has jumped up into the man’s arms, and she’s holding on tight. Then he gently puts her down, and she jumps up onto the female officer, shouting hysterically, “Please don’t let me go! Please don’t let me go!”

“I’m not letting you go,” I hear the officer say.

I look out from the corner a little more, real slow, and I meet eyes with the guy cop.

“What’s your name?” he asks me.

“Gina DeJesus,” I tell him.

He looks like he doesn’t believe me, so I say my full name.

“My name is Georgina DeJesus.”

He looks as if he’s just seen a ghost and says into his radio, “We found them! We found them!” Then he stares at me for a while and says, “We’ve been looking for you for a really long time.”

They keep telling us that we’re safe now, but I’m still not sure.

“Do you know who kidnapped you? What does he look like? Is that him?”

They’re pointing to a picture on Amanda’s wall, but it’s Amanda’s dad, not him.

“If you want pictures of him, you have to go downstairs to the kitchen and look on the refrigerator,” I tell them.

I take them downstairs to show them. There are cops all over the house. When we get to the kitchen, Michelle is already there, pointing out the photos.

We ask if we can go upstairs to get a couple of things, so they take us. I grab my blue book bag, which is filled with a lot of my drawings and letters. I want to show them to my mom and dad. I want to take some of the clothes that I sewed myself, but I don’t have time to grab them, because they are hurrying us outside.

We walk through the front door, which is all smashed up. There are so many people outside, cop cars and flashing lights everywhere.

It’s so bright that it hurts my eyes.

Amanda

The cops bring Gina and Michelle into the ambulance. Michelle’s very emotional and is lying on a gurney, having trouble breathing. Paramedics in light blue gloves are telling her to calm down and breathe slowly.

I’m just sitting here with Joce, watching them, with Gina next to us.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Gina says to me. “I was worried you got hurt.”

The ambulance crew puts a black band on my arm to take my blood pressure, and it nearly squeezes my arm off. We haven’t been to a doctor in ten years. Joce has never even met one.

A guy comes into the ambulance and tells us that he’s an FBI agent, and that his name is Andy Burke. “You guys look the same,” he says, smiling. “The only thing is that you look a lot thinner. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

A nice police officer named Barb Johnson then joins him.

“So,” she asks me, “you’re really Amanda Berry?”

“Yes, I am,” I tell her.

It feels strange after so many years to talk to a total stranger.

“Who’s this little girl?”

“This is my daughter, Jocelyn.”

Joce has calmed down now and she’s looking around in amazement at everything and everybody in the ambulance.

“So this is his daughter?” she says.

“Yes.”

“And you’re really Gina DeJesus?” she asks Gina.

“Yeah,” Gina says.

She’s smiling. I haven’t seen Gina smile in months.

Gina

“You did this? You got us out?” I ask Amanda, sitting next to me in the ambulance.

“Yeah, I did,” she says. “I was so scared. Then I thought of my mom and my sister and I couldn’t let any more time go by. So I did it.”

“Why didn’t you ask me for help?” I ask her.

“Because if I got caught, I wanted it to be me alone,” she says. “I didn’t want him to catch you, too.”

Wait until he finds out it was Amanda who got us out.

“It’s the one you trust most that screws you over in the end,” I tell her.

We both laugh at that. It feels real good to laugh.

The cops are looking for him, and they tell us we never have to see him again.

Jocelyn has calmed down now and is happily babbling and excited about being inside an ambulance. She’s trying to show me something, but when I don’t pay attention, I hear her say: “Gina! Gina!”

It’s the first time she has ever said my real name. She must have heard the police say it.

I’m not Chelsea anymore. I am free.

It seems like it takes forever, but the ambulance starts moving.

We drive to the corner and turn left.

We are off Seymour Avenue, finally and forever.
*

May 6, 2013: Arrest

Dan Brill and Mike Hageman were taking a domestic violence report on West 47th Street when their radios started buzzing.

The two veteran police officers looked at each other: The radio traffic was urgent; something unusual was happening. Hageman stepped outside the house to listen as Brill finished taking the woman’s statement.

“It sounds like they found Amanda Berry,” Hageman said when Brill returned to the car.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Brill said.

Nearly every cop on the west side of Cleveland knew Amanda Berry’s name and face. For ten years, her photo had been up on the wall of the Second District headquarters, on telephone poles, and on highway billboards. Everyone wanted to believe she was still alive, but cops know these long-term missing-person cases typically end when someone discovers bones.

But now the excited chatter on the police radio was saying that Amanda Berry was alive and safe on Seymour Avenue, just a few minutes away.

“Be advised, suspect Ariel Castro, fifty-two-year-old Hispanic male, is driving a blue Mazda Miata convertible,” the dispatcher announced.

Brill and Hageman knew that half the police cars in Cleveland were already on Seymour Avenue, so they decided to look for the Miata. They started driving east on Clark Avenue, a busy main road not far from Castro’s house. And there it was: just up ahead, a blue Miata was pulling up to a stop sign with two Hispanic males in their fifties in the two-seater convertible.

As the police moved closer, the driver of the Miata saw the cruiser and made eye contact with the officers. Brill and Hageman were waiting for “the look,” the expression they see on the faces of car thieves, drunk drivers, or any other driver who doesn’t want to attract police attention: a guilty look, then a careful effort to direct their attention anywhere but at the officers.

The Miata driver did none of that. He seemed totally calm.

He headed down Clark Avenue and then turned right into a McDonald’s parking lot.

Brill radioed in the license plate: FHY4669.

The confirmation came quickly: It was Castro’s 1993 Miata. “That’s the male we’re looking for,” the dispatcher said.

The officers pulled up directly behind the car and turned on their overhead flashing lights. The two men in the car turned around, clearly bewildered. Hageman and Brill approached them, asked for IDs, and told them to keep their hands in plain sight. Ariel Castro was the driver, and his brother, Onil, was in the passenger seat with a dog on his lap. The cops ordered them out of the car.

Ariel said nothing, but Onil seemed confused. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What did Pedro do?”

Onil told the officers that if their brother Pedro, who had a severe drinking problem, had gotten into some kind of trouble, they could find him at his house, where he lived with their mother. He demanded to be released.

“We will explain this all to you,” Brill said. “But right now we need you to cooperate with us.”

Onil was still holding the dog, and the officers saw that there was another dog in a plastic milk crate in the space behind the seats. Onil was still complaining loudly about being stopped when the officers told him to put both dogs in the crate.

As they handcuffed both men, Ariel Castro was silent.

Officer Tom Connole pulled up in a second patrol car and quietly updated Brill and Hageman: “He held three girls kidnapped for ten years. One of the other ones is Gina DeJesus.”

Brill was shocked. Not only was Amanda alive, but so was Gina, whose disappearance was just as well-known in Cleveland. So they had been together all these years.

The officers put Onil in their patrol car and Ariel in Connole’s vehicle. They were each read their Miranda rights, and when Ariel Castro was told he was being held on suspicion of kidnapping, he seemed stunned. He started to speak, but then stopped and slouched down in the patrol car.

The brothers were taken to the Second District police headquarters, a five-minute drive from Castro’s home, and locked up separately. Ariel Castro was placed in Cell 22, a tiny room with a concrete floor and yellow brick walls. Previous occupants of the cell had scratched their colorful street names into the bars over the years: Baldy D, Bobby 104, Lil Bryan. Castro sat there silently. In another cell across the room, Onil was mouthing off to the officers, demanding to be freed and insisting he had done nothing wrong.

Police had found their brother Pedro passed out drunk in his backyard and arrested him as well. He now lay on the floor of a third cell, still sleeping it off.

All three men were given dark blue “paper suits,” which are generally used for prisoners who are a suicide risk. The police had taken that precaution because the case was so extraordinary and was already drawing overwhelming media attention. Onil was furious about being forced to change clothes, but Ariel quietly slipped into the outfit while officers changed the unconscious Pedro.

The Cleveland police and FBI did not want to make any procedural missteps in such a high-profile case, so they decided to wait until the next morning to question the suspects. For the next few hours, until well after midnight when Castro was transferred downtown to the Justice Center lockup, police, FBI agents, and other officials came to his cell door to catch a glimpse of the man accused of such breathtaking crimes. Throughout it all Castro sat silently on a wooden chair beneath the cell’s neon light.

He never asked a single question about why he was being held.

May 6, 2013: Reunion

At the moment Amanda was kicking out the door of 2207 Seymour Avenue, Nancy Ruiz was preparing dinner for her sister Janice three blocks down the street. Janice lived there with two other sisters, a nephew, and his family. She had suffered a stroke a week earlier and had been released from the hospital that afternoon. The house had been in the family for about fifty years, and its fresh white paint and tidy yard made it stand out on an otherwise run-down block.

Nancy was cooking a chicken stew while Janice rested in her bedroom. Her doctors had said that Janice needed quiet, so Nancy had drawn the curtains and shut off her phone and the TV to make sure nothing disturbed her.

Outside, though, Nancy heard a commotion—sirens and people shouting. She didn’t think much of it, but then the door swung open and her older sister Sandra burst in and shouted, “They found three girls in a basement down the street!”

Nancy froze.

“Oh, my God,” she said. “Is it Gina?”

“I don’t know,” Sandra said. “But we have to go!”

They took off down the street and parked near the corner of West 25th Street, right behind Cesi Castro’s Caribe Grocery. Cesi and his wife, Norma, were standing outside the market watching the chaotic scene—police cars with flashing lights, TV satellite trucks, a gathering crowd.

As she passed, Nancy quickly hugged Norma, whom she had known since she was a teenager, and began running toward the police cars. She ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape and saw Andy Burke, an FBI agent who had been working on Gina’s case from the beginning.

“Please,” she said to him, “just tell me! Is it Gina?”

“Yes, it is,” Burke said.

“Oh, my God!” Nancy shouted. “Oh, my God! They said there’s a baby. Is it hers?”

“No,” he told her, “it’s not hers.”

She fell into his arms and they both started crying. “They’re in that ambulance right there,” Burke said, pointing toward the emergency vehicle pulling away down the street.

“You have to go to Metro Hospital,” Burke told her. “That’s where she’s going.”

Cleveland Deputy Police Chief Edward J. Tomba, who had just arrived, put Nancy and Sandra into his cruiser and tore off, sirens blaring, toward the hospital.

Gina

We’ve only been in the ambulance for a few minutes when we pull up to Metro Hospital. They wheel Michelle in on the gurney, but Amanda and I walk, and she’s carrying Jocelyn.

I was sick so many times inside that house and wanted to go to a doctor, but now here I am at this huge hospital, and all I want to do is stay outside and breathe the fresh air for hours.

Doctors lead us into a big room with three beds that says
TRAUMA
16
and
TRAUMA
17
over its doors. The whole wall is glass, so we can sit on the beds and see the nurses’ station and all the doctors and cops rushing around.

They put Amanda and Jocelyn on the bed at one end, Michelle in the middle, and me on the third and pull curtains around each of us. A doctor examines me and tells me I weigh a hundred pounds—thirty pounds less than when I was kidnapped. Then I hear a voice I haven’t heard in nine years.

“Gina!”

It’s my mom.

A cop is helping her make her way to me because she almost fainted when she saw me.

“Hi, Mommy,” I say, very quietly.

Neither of us knows what else to say, so we just hold each other. My mom keeps looking at me and touching me, checking me out to make sure I’m really okay. She’s smiling and crying at the same time.

A few minutes later my dad runs in and hugs me, and then my sister Mayra.

There must be a hundred police and FBI guys in the hallway, some of them looking through the glass and others who come in to say hello. Some of them are crying and a couple of them even fall to their knees, sobbing.

My mom and I can’t stop hugging.

“Mommy,” I ask when we finally pull apart, “do you still make mashed potatoes, fried chicken, and corn?”

“We can make it tonight!” she says.

“I want to go to the mall,” I tell her.

“We’ll go tomorrow!” she says.

Then I remember that I have something for her.

“Wait, Mommy, wait,” I tell her. “I gotta show you something.”

I get the book bag I took when we left Seymour Avenue and pull out a “missing” flyer of me, the one that he got from her and that I decorated with glittery hearts and pictures of food.

“Look what I have,” I say, handing it to her.

“Oh, my God,” she says.

She recognizes this flyer, and she’s starting to put it all together.

I think if Ariel Castro were standing here right now, she would kill him.

Amanda

Where is Beth?

I wish she would get here. I’m dying to see her. Gina’s family has been here for a while, and a nice woman named Yvonne Pointer is talking to Michelle.

The nurse says Pointer’s daughter was murdered in 1984, and now she’s an activist who helps victims of violence. She’s sitting on the bed with Michelle, holding her hand, and they are singing:
“Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring.”

The doctors keep poking and pulling at me, checking my heartbeat and blood pressure. I weigh ninety-two pounds, and I was one-twenty when he took me. They take swabs from my mouth and Jocelyn’s to check our DNA.

The nurses bring us a sandwich, chips, and juice. They ask Jocelyn what her favorite food is, and she says, “KFC!” So somebody runs out and gets her some. She’s excited but takes one bite and realizes it’s the spicy kind. Too hot for her, so she gulps down water.

And then I see Beth.

She’s walking through the nurses’ station but hasn’t noticed me yet. She looks so skinny, even thinner than I am. But it’s really Beth! And my aunt Theresa and my cousin Melissa!

Beth looks through the glass window and finally catches sight of me.

She starts pushing her way through the chaos until she finally reaches me, and we hug. We’re both crying hard, and Theresa and Melissa put their arms around me, too. Jocelyn is sitting on the bed staring at all this. I don’t think she has any idea what’s going on.

“Who is this?” Theresa asks.

“That’s my daughter, Jocelyn,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “tell her to come over here!”

So Jocelyn joins in the hug, and I introduce everyone. She knows exactly who they are because I have been talking about them for her entire life.

“Is Daddy okay?” I ask Beth. “I heard on the news he was really sick.”

“Yeah,” Beth replies. “He’s okay.”

“And what about you? You’re so skinny. Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I’m fine.”

An FBI agent named Tim Kolonick comes in and introduces himself.

“We’ve been looking for you for ten years,” he says.

“I know. I saw you guys on TV. Thanks for not forgetting us.”

He looks at Jocelyn and asks her name. “She’s gorgeous,” he says, smiling at her.

In a few minutes the police ask me to come to a separate room and answer questions. I tell Jocelyn to wait with Betsy Martinez, a nurse who has been taking good care of us. I can tell Joce is getting more comfortable, because she’s running all over the place, with her face all red from a cherry Popsicle somebody gave her.

“I’ve got a joke, Miss Betsy,” she says to the nurse.

“What’s your joke?”

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“To get to the other side!! I got you!!!”

And she laughs and laughs and laughs.

Amanda

They ask me if I want a shower.

God, I would love a shower, a long one, without worrying about someone pawing me. Just a hot, peaceful shower. I can’t remember the last one I had. It used to be my favorite thing.

Today—Monday—was my bath day anyway. He had a schedule in the house. It depended on the season and the weather, but usually Jocelyn and I got to take a shower every four or five days. Tonight it was going to be our turn to go downstairs to use the shower.

They lead us to a big bathroom. It’s so clean! I close the door and lock it, and Joce and I stand under the hot water, soaking and shampooing and scrubbing. It’s been ten years since I have been able to use all the soap and shampoo I want. I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet smells. I’m so happy it almost makes me cry.

As we’re scrubbing, the diamond stud in my ear falls out and slips down the drain. He used to wear it and then gave it to me. This seems like a fitting moment to have that little trace of him disappear forever.

We dry off with fluffy towels and put on some clothes that a nurse gave us. She says it was stuff that her family had outgrown. When I escaped from the house, I was wearing a tank top and a pair of baby-blue pants that Gina had sewn for me out of fabric from an old dress. Now Jocelyn is wearing a Disney princess dress and I’m in a track suit. I can’t wait to buy brand-new clothes that nobody else has ever worn.