Ohio mom lashes out at social worker who 'groomed,' raped 13-year-old son Payton Shires, who allegedly filmed the sick crimes, has a 4-year-old son

 

Ohio mom lashes out at social worker who 'groomed,' raped 13-year-old son

Payton Shires, who allegedly filmed the sick crimes, has a 4-year-old son.

The regret-ridden mother of a 13-year-old boy who was groomed and raped by his adult female social worker wishes she never let the predator in her home.

In a statement read in court Thursday, the unidentified mother told Payton Shires, of Ohio, that the abuse has devastated her son and negated any faith she had in the nation's social services, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

"Instead, he was manipulated, groomed and sexually abused by Ms. Shires," the statement read, according to the local newspaper. "I regret ever letting you in my house."

Amanda Berry’s Daughter Born During Ariel Castro Kidnapping is 13 Years Old Now

A family photo of Amanda Berry with her daughter, Jocelyn, who is now 13 years old.

Berry tried to make her life as normal as possible while being held captive and how Jocelyn is doing now.

Jocelyn’s Mother Amanda Was Just 16 When She Was Kidnapped. On April 21, 2003, just one day away from turning 17, Amanda Berry disappeared after working her shift at a local fast-food restaurant. She was initially considered a runaway, but a week after her disappearance, Berry’s mother received a call from Berry’s cell phone where an unidentified man said, “I have Amanda. She’s fine and will be coming home in a couple of days,” the FBI told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

She was raped, starved, fed one meal a day. At the time the women were found, Reuters reported that Knight told police she suffered at least five miscarriages over the 10+ years of captivity, saying she was starved for weeks and beaten in the stomach by Castro in order to induce them.

The women were found when Berry managed to escape with the help of a neighbor who heard her screaming. Knight was 20 years old when she was kidnapped in 2002 and DeJesus was 14 when she was kidnapped in 2004.

Amanda’s daughter Jocelyn Was Born in 2006. On Christmas Day 2006, Amanda gave birth to Jocelyn in an inflatable kiddie swimming pool. Knight told authorities she assisted in the birth; Castro had said he would kill her if the baby didn’t survive. At one point, the baby wasn’t breathing, but Knight said she was able to resuscitate her, according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

During the birth, Berry told 20/20/i> that Knight was just trying to calm her down. Knight said she cried “so much” because she wasn’t a medical expert and was scared of what would happen. But Berry said when she looked at her daughter for the first time, it was just “amazing.”

“It was amazing ’cause she was so quiet and she was just the most beautiful thing … this is his kid. How do I feel about that? She resembled him a lot and I would look at her and I just felt likeAfter Jocelyn was born, Castro, whom she called “daddy,” occasionally took the little girl to visit his mother, Lillian Rodriguez, whom she called “grandmother.” He also showed Jocelyn’s picture to his adult daughters and told them she was his daughter with his ex-girlfriend, according to USA Today. A DNA test eventually confirmed that Castro was Jocelyn’s father., ‘She’s mine. She’s mine,'” Berry said.

What is Gina DeJesus doing now?

 After her escape from captivity, Gina DeJesus has made great efforts to assist people who have faced a similar ordeal as she did.

Gina was reported to be last seen on April 2, 2004, when she was 14 years old at a payphone on her way home from her middle school at West 105th Street and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. Gina was friends with Ariel Castro's teenage daughter, so she assumed Castro, who she trusted, was picking her up to drop her off at home. This was not the case.

What is Gina DeJesus doing now?

In 2018, Gina launched a nonprofit, Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults, to help families whose loved ones have been abducted.

Gina states "I want to help families because my family didn't have anything. They didn't get help. My parents didn't have people actually helping them do the flyers and stuff. We could actually help other families with all of that instead of them worrying and freaking out."

Today, Gina and her family travel around the U.S. to train law enforcement agencies on how to deal with families of missing persons.

Read her book titled, Hope, here.

Michelle Knight is Married

Listen to a free sample of Finding Me: A Decade of Darkness, a Life Reclaimed here

Michelle Knight met her husband Miguel Rodriguez, a 39-year-old courier, through mutual friends on Facebook. They had been speaking on the phone for some time until meeting in person for the first time by running into each other at a restaurant.

“I looked up and said, ‘I’m not catfished. You’re really, really real,’ ” she remembers.

As their bond grew in strength, Knight still remained anxious about physical intimacy. In addition to Castro’s sexual abuse, Knight also had been abused as a child by a relative.

“I had some fears that any intimacy might feel like what Castro had done to me, what others had done to me,” she wrote in Life After Darkness. Click here to listen to a free audio sample of the book.

Life After Darkness. Click here to listen to a free audio sample of the book.

“We waited; we took our time,” she wrote. “When it did happen, I realized I didn’t have anything to fear. The experience was entirely different. What made the difference was love.”

Where Are They Now?

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were held captive for nearly 10 years before they were rescued in 2013

In 2013, kidnapping victim Amanda Berry miraculously escaped from a boarded-up Cleveland home after nearly a decade of captivity and called 911.

"Help me. I'm Amanda Berry," she told the dispatcher. "I've been kidnapped and missing for 10 years. I am here. I am free now."

Within minutes, Cleveland Police also discovered Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight, who had been chained, tortured and abused along with Berry for almost a decade. Their captor, Ariel Castro, was convicted of kidnapping and raping the three women and sentenced to life in prison. A month later, he was found hanging by a bedsheet inside his cell, dead by suicide.

Since then, the three women have gone their separate ways and continue to heal from the decade-long trauma.

Get this special edition magazine here 

Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

Two victims of the infamous Cleveland kidnapper share the story of their abductions, their decade in captivity, and their final, dramatic rescue.

On May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry made headlines around the world when she fled a Cleveland area home and called 911, saying: “Help me, I’m Amanda Berry...I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for 10 years".

A horrifying story rapidly unfolded. Ariel Castro, a local school bus driver, had separately lured Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight to his home, where he kept them chained in the basement. In the decade that followed, the three were raped, psychologically abused, and threatened with death. Berry bore a child - Jocelyn - by their captor.

Drawing upon their recollections and the diaries they kept, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus describe a tale of unimaginable torment, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan interweave the events within Castro’s house with the ongoing efforts to find the missing girls.

The full story behind the headlines - including shocking information never previously released - Hope is a harrowing yet inspiring chronicle of three women whose courage, ingenuity, and resourcefulness ultimately delivered them back to their lives and families.

Listen to a free audio sample below here

FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY!!!

Where are Berry, DeJesus, and Knight now

It has been almost five years since three women miraculously escaped from a Cleveland home where they had been held captive for a decade.

Since their escape on May 6, 2013, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Lily Rose Lee (formerly known as Michelle Knight) have been rebuilding their lives and relationships, and continuing to move forward.

Lee, who changed her name to reflect her favorite flowers, recently announced that she is working on her second book, “Life After Darkness: My Journey to Happiness.” It will publish on May 1, 2018, days before the five-year anniversary of her escape from captivity.

“She has kept a fairly low-profile,” says Georgina Levitt, publishing director for Weinstein Books, which is publishing Lee’s book. “There will be reveals about her new life.”

Her first book, the New York Times bestselling memoir Finding Me, revealed how a troubled childhood helped her cope with some of her darkest days in captivity.

“I don’t dwell on the past. I really try to look forward,” says Lee, 36. “I want to be remembered as a victor, not a victim.”

Meanwhile, Berry, now 32, has turned her attention toward spotlighting missing people in the northeast Ohio area. When she was inside captor Ariel Castro‘s home, he would let her see news segments of people searching for her. (Castro later hanged himself while serving a lifetime prison sentence.)

Berry is hosting a 30-second daily news segment on Cleveland’s Fox 8 because she wants missing people to know the public is still looking for them.

“I hope we get [the faces of] missing people out there and get people looking at them a second time, a third time, and looking at their name,” Berry told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview last February. “It’s kind of the small things that makes a big difference.”

As for DeJesus, 28 years-old and the youngest of the group, she has been quietly enjoying life with her tight-knit family in a new home in the suburbs of Cleveland.