Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland (8 page)

In April 1992, Castro bought the house at 2207 Seymour Avenue for $12,000 from his uncle, Edwin Castro, and the family moved into the little two-story home.

Castro treated Angie and his other two daughters well, and Angie said it was fun when he would take the kids for rides in his school bus. When he was in a good mood he could be a good father. But on his worst days he continued to beat Nilda, and he began smacking around his son, Ariel Anthony, who was just ten. Nilda cried when she told her sister that he was forcing her to have sex when she didn’t want to, and when the children could hear them.

Castro started nailing the windows shut, saying it wasn’t a safe neighborhood. He would often act as if he were leaving, but then sneak back into the house and listen to Nilda’s phone calls from an extension in the basement.

“What’s that noise?” Elida asked Nilda one day when they were on the phone.

“Oh, I think that’s Ariel listening on the other line.”

Nilda told her sister that she wanted to take her kids and go far away, but she was afraid of what Castro might do.

“If you ever take my kids, I will kill you,” he told her.

Nilda never felt well again after crashing down the stairs and suffered from chronic headaches and blood clots. In late 1993, eight years after the fall, doctors at the Cleveland Clinic discovered a tumor and operated to remove it. It was a meningioma, a type of tumor that is sometimes linked to injury or trauma to the brain, and the prognosis was not good.

“Ariel did this to me,” she told Elida.

On the day after Christmas in 1993, about a month after Nilda’s surgery, Castro got drunk and started hitting her, then left the house. She called 911 and told officers that Castro had beaten her, even though she had recently had brain surgery and was very weak.

While the police were searching the neighborhood for him, Castro returned to the house, banging on the door and screaming at Nilda to let him in. Angie, then ten, was upset that her father was outside in the cold and didn’t realize he had just beaten her mother. She stood next to the Christmas tree in the living room and screamed: “Let Daddy in! Let Daddy in!”

Nilda relented, and when she unlocked the door he began beating her again. As the terrified children watched, she fell to the floor and he began to stomp on her head with his boot. When Castro realized that his son was running to call the police, he chased after him out the front door. Police officers saw Castro running away from the house, captured him, and took him to jail. Nilda, pushed past her limit, went to the police station the following day and gave a more detailed, formal statement. The case was referred to the county prosecutor, who decided there was enough evidence of domestic violence to present it to a grand jury.

A felony conviction could have put Castro behind bars, but on February 9, 1994, a grand jury declined to indict him. Because Nilda refused to testify, there was insufficient evidence. Castro had been staking out the entrance to the Justice Center courthouse and stopped her just before she entered to testify, offering her money and a car if she remained silent. He also threatened her, called her a bitch, and warned her: “You know what will happen to you if you do.”

Nilda called her sister and said Castro threatened to kill her and their kids if she testified before the grand jury. Convinced that he was capable of fulfilling his threat, Nilda turned around and walked away from the courthouse.

 • • • 

Fernando Colon first saw Nilda Figueroa in the summer of 1995 in the emergency room of Grace Hospital near downtown Cleveland. She was bleeding, had a broken nose, a missing tooth, and bruises on her face.

Colon, a security guard at the hospital, had encountered her there several times with similar injuries and knew that she was being beaten. Recently divorced, he had just moved from New York to Cleveland, where he was hoping to start over. He wanted to be a police officer.

Hospital staff were suspicious about Nilda’s injuries, but she insisted that she had fallen down the stairs, or made up some other story. She confided in Colon that the beatings would only get worse if she told doctors the truth.

When Nilda returned for a follow-up visit, Colon found her sitting on a chair in the hallway, looking frightened.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“Yeah, well,” she replied, “for the moment I’m okay.”

“Do you want to talk?”

Nilda then began recounting her years of abuse at Castro’s hands, including the times he beat her with barbells. She was in constant pain, suffering from seizures, and was losing vision in her left eye.

Colon and Nilda stayed in touch, and during one of her hospital appointments he said to her, “If I help, will you leave? You can’t go through this no more. That dude’s going to kill you.”

When Nilda said she wanted help but was afraid of Castro, he told her, “Don’t worry about him. Let me worry about him.”

Nilda started making plans to leave Castro, and one day in early 1996, nearly sixteen years after she moved in with him, Colon drove over and took her away from Seymour Avenue when Castro was not home. She packed three of her kids and some belongings in his car, and he brought her to her mother’s house. Angie, who was twelve, insisted on staying with her father.

When he discovered what had happened, Castro tracked Colon down by phone and yelled: “You have my wife!”

“You’re abusing this woman,” Colon shot back. “I got copies of the medical records from the hospital. If you want trouble, I’m going to give you trouble. So you either back off or you’re going to end up in jail.”

Nilda and the children eventually moved in with Colon, and one day Castro followed one of his daughters home to see where Nilda was living.

“What you did was wrong,” he screamed at Colon.

“No, what I did was right, ’cause you was gonna kill that woman.”

“I’m not like that,” Castro said.

In March 1996, Nilda filed a Juvenile Court petition seeking full custody of all their children. She told the court that Angie was living with her father and being “improperly cared for” and that she feared for her safety because of Castro’s “record for long-term spousal abuse.”

Nilda said that Castro had been “able to remove my children from school because of his position as a Cleveland Public School bus driver.” At times she had gone to the bus stop to pick up her children after school only to find that Castro had already taken them.

The case dragged on for months, but in January 1997, Nilda was awarded sole custody of all four children, including Angie, who came to live with her.

 • • • 

For Lillian Roldan, it was love at first sight.

She met Ariel Castro in 2000, at a friend’s house. He was sitting in the living room, playing his bass, well dressed and attractive.

Castro was forty, almost twice her age. He lived alone, had been separated from his ex for four years, and though the oldest of his kids was almost Lillian’s age, she found him charming and funny, and they began going out almost immediately. She went to his gigs and brought him to her parents’ house, and he charmed them, too.

She would occasionally spend the night at Castro’s house on Seymour Avenue. They slept in the master bedroom upstairs, and the house seemed completely normal to Lillian, apart from the fact that he kept the basement door locked with a padlock. When she asked about it, he explained that he kept his cash in the cellar, so he wanted to make certain it was secure.

The relationship went well until one day in late 2002, when Lillian received a letter from Castro in which he said he loved her, but not enough to keep the relationship going. He told her to call him if she ever needed help, but that they were no longer a couple.

Castro later told police that he broke it off with Lillian several months after he kidnapped Michelle Knight in August 2002, explaining that he “couldn’t juggle both of them.” On the day he abducted Michelle, he chained her in the basement and then left to spend the night with Lillian at her home. He tried to find excuses to keep Lillian out of the Seymour house, but it was getting more and more difficult. One day when they were standing in the driveway, she noticed a TV on upstairs, and she asked why, since there was no one in the house.

“It was a close call,” Castro later admitted to police. “My heart started beating.”

When Lillian’s mother died in Puerto Rico a few months later and she didn’t have enough cash to fly there to take care of the arrangements, she went to Castro’s house to borrow money. He made her wait in the driveway while he went inside and got her a thousand dollars.

By then Amanda Berry was also locked in Castro’s house.

Lillian later repaid him, but never saw him again.

April 2, 2004: Family Friend

Gina

It’s six thirty on a drizzly Friday morning. Time to get up.

My mom is drinking coffee downstairs at the dining-room table, and my two little nieces are up already, too. I open the cabinet, find the Pop-Tarts, and drop two in the toaster.

“We gotta go! Let’s go,” says my dad as the girls run all over the kitchen, giggling. Though it’s still dark outside, the house is already noisy. It’s always like that. Seven people live here: my parents, Nancy Ruiz and Felix DeJesus; my brother, Ricky; my sister, Mayra; her two daughters, Tatiana and Nancy; and me. It’s a small home, and we all share one bathroom. My dad talks about building an addition, but it never seems to happen, because there’s never enough money.

My mom stays home and takes care of all of us, and my dad works in a factory that makes blades for industrial saws. They’re both from Puerto Rico and have huge families. We have big reunions with tons of relatives and close friends we call cousins but who are not actually related. On holidays it feels like our front door never stops opening.

Sometimes it’s actually a little too crazy for me. I’m only fourteen and shyer than everybody else in the family. When we have big parties, I take the little kids upstairs away from the music and noise. We play games and laugh, and that’s just fine by me. Everybody’s always hugging, and I don’t like being touched. I don’t even like making eye contact with strangers. My mom’s always trying to get me to look people in the eye. I know she’s right, but it makes me uncomfortable. I love all the fun we have in our busy house, but I also love peace. I like things quiet.

It’s getting late, so I hurry. I grab a few bites of a Pop-Tart and tell the girls they can eat the rest.

When it’s cold outside, my dad and I have a morning routine: He goes out first and gets the car warm for me. We have an old white Nissan Sentra that my dad bought for $500 from my friend Arlene’s dad, Ariel Castro. It’s kind of junky, but at least we have a car. A lot of people in my neighborhood can’t even afford one. And our car’s heater works really well.

“Bye, Mom! Love you!” I yell as I grab my blue coat with white fur lining. “See ya later!”

“Bye, Gina. Love you,” she says. “See you after school!”

We live on West 71st Street, two blocks from the railroad tracks. The trains race through our neighborhood in the middle of the night and are really loud, especially when they blow their horns. Lots of people cut across the tracks to get to Kmart and Big Lots on West 65th Street, but my mom never lets me do that. A few homeless people sleep by the tracks, and people sell drugs there. There’s an empty warehouse on our street, and a couple of abandoned factories near the tracks.

My mom says this neighborhood isn’t safe, so she lets me play in our front yard, but that’s it. One day the cops were chasing a guy, and he threw baggies filled with dope into our bushes, then came back later to get them. After that my dad cut down all our bushes. Another time a lady right down the street got mugged in her own garage, so now she has a huge fence and padlocks everywhere. Mom says it looks like Fort Knox.

This is a neighborhood where families live for a while, then move farther west toward the suburbs when they get some money. Four years ago we moved out of an apartment over on Scranton Road and bought this house so we could have more space. I don’t know how long we’ll stay. I think my mom would leave now if we could.

As my dad and I drive away from my house, I turn the radio to 96.5 KISS FM and listen until they have a commercial, then switch to a different station. Dad says he is amazed at all the lyrics I know. It doesn’t matter who comes on—Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani, Alicia Keys, Usher, Kanye West—I sing along with the radio the whole way to school, and my dad smiles.

He and Mom were understanding last week when I lost my glasses. I dropped them in the street and they were run over by a car. They were new prescription ones with gold wire rims. I need them because my left eye is weaker than my right, so I have an appointment in two weeks to get another pair.

My dad is quiet like me. We love to go out in the backyard at night, just the two of us, and stare up at the stars. He came to Cleveland from Puerto Rico when he was twelve, dropped out of high school, and started working in factories. When he was twenty-one he met my mom at a bar, and then they went to a party where a couple got into such a big fight that she started throwing all his clothes out the window. My dad couldn’t stop laughing, and my mom fell for him right then.

He played softball and football with the guys from the neighborhood, but he also hung out with a tough crowd that got him into trouble with the cops. But that was before I was born. Now he is always telling me to be careful about who my friends are. I’m his baby, and he’s my big teddy bear.

My mom was born in Cleveland in 1960, but when she was nine she moved with my grandparents back to Yauco, a coffee-growing town in Puerto Rico where many people in Cleveland had come from. Life was simple and healthy there. The family would “eat off the trees,” with oranges and avocados and other fruits and vegetables they grew on their own land. They caught their own fish and walked everywhere. Mom lived there until she was seventeen, when my grandpa Benny moved the family back to Cleveland. She cried for days because she couldn’t get used to it. She weighed a hundred fifteen pounds when she got here, then gained sixty pounds in a year. In Yauco, breakfast would be coffee with a little goat’s milk and crackers—maybe toast once in a while. But in Cleveland, the kitchen was filled with gallons of milk, cereal, bread, and cans of spaghetti, and Mom ate like crazy.