Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (38 page)

Amanda Berry was kidnapped on April 21, 2003, one day before her seventeenth birthday.

Gina DeJesus was only fourteen when she disappeared nearly a year later, on April 2, 2004.

2207 Seymour Avenue, the house in Cleveland where Ariel Castro kept three women imprisoned for about a decade.

After their abductions, Amanda and Gina were each initially held in the cluttered Seymour house basement, where they were chained to a post.

A few weeks after she was taken, Gina wrote a letter to her parents to reassure them that she was alive, but Castro never allowed her to send it.

Louwana Miller appeared often in the media pleading for the return of her daughter. She died in 2006 without ever learning what happened to Amanda.

Gina’s parents, Felix DeJesus and Nancy Ruiz, became impassioned advocates on behalf of missing children during the search for their daughter. Here Felix looks at photos of the missing.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children released a “missing” poster of Amanda and Gina that was widely distributed by the U.S. Postal Service.

The FBI later created a scale model of the Seymour house.

An overhead shot shows the second-floor rooms where the girls were held. For most of their captivity, Amanda lived in bedroom (I), while Gina and Michelle Knight lived in the adjacent room (J).

Chained in their rooms each day when Castro left for his job, the young women attempted to make their captivity as comfortable as possible by adding personal touches. Gina and Michelle, who were forced to share a bed (
here
), decorated a small refrigerator in their room (
here
).