Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight have come a long way and here are some updates.
On May 6, 2013, the city of Cleveland witnessed a miracle when Amanda Berry called 911 from a neighbor’s phone.
“I’ve been kidnapped and been missing for 10 years. I’m here. I’m free now,” Berry, now 29, told the 911 operator.
Berry, along with Gina DeJesus, now 25, and Michelle Knight, had been held captive for more than 10 years by Ariel Castro. Castro kidnapped each of the women between 2002 and 2004.
Cleveland Kidnapping Survivors Describe Rooms in Ariel Castro's Home, and How Far They've Come
For years, the women endured unimaginable abuse, as they were chained, starved and tortured by Castro. But during their captivity, they held on to the conviction that their families would never give up on them. That faith helped bring them home.
Sarah Baker, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Berry and DeJesus together wrote their memoir, “Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland,” with Washington Post journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, and it was released on April 27. The two young women say they have since moved on with their lives.
April 21, 2003: Amanda Berry Is Abducted
Just a day before her 17th birthday on April 21, 2003, Amanda Berry got up and got ready for work.
“I almost called off of work that day ‘cause the next day was my birthday. You know, what if? What if I would’ve called off that day?” Berry said.
On her walk home from work, she encountered a vehicle in a driveway.
“I kind of had to walk around the van and so I kind of looked at them, and it was a man and his daughter. And I smiled at them ‘cause I'm like, ‘Oh, she looks familiar,’” Berry said.
Later, the vehicle started to follow her down the street, and the man inside asked her if she needed a ride home.
“I said, ‘Yes,’" Berry said. "I see that the girl, there’s nobody else in the van anymore. It’s just him.”
The man, Ariel Castro, was an elementary school bus driver and the father of a classmate from middle school.
“He’s like, ‘Well she’s at my house. Would you like to go see her?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Berry said.
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After they entered the white, two storied house on Seymour Avenue, Berry said Castro told her that his daughter might be taking a bath.
“So he said, ‘We’ll just wait,’” Berry said. “So he started showing me around the house. And I never got back out.”
Castro took her upstairs and showed her something strange: a mystery woman sleeping in a bedroom in front of a television set. She later learned that the woman was 22-year-old Michelle Knight, who had been Castro’s prisoner for almost a year. Her memories of what happened next are still raw.
“He took me to the next bedroom, and it was just really dark in there, and he didn’t turn on the lights, and there was a little, like, a little room off of the bigger bedroom, kind of a big closet,” Berry said. “And he took me in there, and he told me to pull down my pants. And from there I knew, like, this was not going to be good.”
She became Castro’s second prisoner.
“He took me to the basement and he taped my wrist and he taped my ankles and he put on a belt around my ankles over the tape,” Berry said. “He put a helmet over my head, and he said, ‘Just be quiet and don’t make any noise. And I’ll take you home.’”
Berry said he chained her to a pole, shut off the lights and left her in the dark with a television.
“I just started screaming and crying. And, ‘Somebody please help me,’ you know. And nobody, nobody came,” she said. “I was so scared that I was going to die. I didn’t think that I was going to ever make it home.”
April 24, 2003: Day 4 of Amanda Berry’s Captivity
As news of her abduction made headlines, Berry watched her mother and her sister on the TV in the basement.
“That kept me going. And I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to make it home to you. As long as you fight, I’m going to fight,’” Berry said.
On the fourth day of her abduction, April 24, 2003, Berry said Castro moved her to an upstairs bedroom and chained her to a radiator.
“It was really hard, you know, ‘cause in the beginning the chain was around my stomach,” Berry said. “Going to sleep at night, you know, if you wanted to toss on to your back, you couldn’t do that, you would have to take the whole chain and move it to the front of your stomach so that you're not laying on the big lock on your back.”
Heidi Gutman/Amore +
“Well, the first week I was there was really tough,” Berry said. “So he eventually asked me, ‘Well, would you like to, you know, do you want me to get you something from the store, something to pass the time?’ So I asked for maybe a coloring book and something I can write in, a journal or something.”
He gave her a diary with a tiny lock and key. She wrote her first entry by the flickering light of the TV.
“You never know what you got ‘til it’s gone! I just can’t wait to go home. I’m 17 now, but don’t have a life. But he told me I’m young and will go home before summer. Another two months!” Amanda wrote in her diary.
One Week After Amanda Berry’s Abduction, Castro Calls Her Family
Berry was missing for a week when her family received a late-night call from Castro, taunting them, using Berry’s cell phone.
“He called and said, ‘I have Mandy,’ which, nobody called her Mandy but [people] who knew her,” said Berry’s sister, Beth Serrano. “'She wants to be with me.'”
The call led rescuers to within two blocks of Castro’s house. In 2003, the FBI was just starting to develop technology that could track a cell phone’s location if it was turned on.
“We spent about a week, around the clock, in that area, hoping that this phone would be used again,” FBI agent Tim Kolonik said. But Castro never used Berry’s phone again.
FBI
Meanwhile, Berry’s dark and filthy room at Castro’s house was about the size of a closet.
“The mattress was old and nasty, and it was just disgusting. And we had the bucket to use the bathroom, and that smelled horrible,” Berry said.
Once a day, Berry said, Castro gave her a bag of chips or crackers or other food to eat. But everything, including her weekly shower, came at a price.
“I mean, he tried to act nice, but he’s like, ‘Well, maybe you need to go take a shower,’ and I had to take a shower with him,” Berry said.
Berry said she had to “numb” herself to the sexual abuse.
“You, like, put your mind somewhere else so that you're not there. You know, you're not in that room with him,” Berry said.
In her diary, Berry used a code to record how many times he raped her.
“I would always write these numbers at the top of the pages, ‘cause I felt like, you know, one day maybe authorities will get to read it. And he’ll be punished for what he did,” Berry said.
Months into Berry’s captivity, Castro made her a disturbing promise.
“He would always tell me when he got another girl in the house that you know, ‘I’m just looking for this, another girl and then I will take you home,’” Berry said.
Almost a year after Berry became his prisoner, Castro went on the prowl again just five blocks away from the street where he kidnapped Berry.
April 2, 2004: Gina DeJesus Is Abducted
Gina DeJesus, then 14 years old, was close friends with Castro’s daughter, Arlene Castro. Ariel Castro was also friends with DeJesus’ dad. On the day she was kidnapped, DeJesus and Arlene Castro were heading home from school. DeJesus gave Arlene Castro some of her bus money to phone home.
“I was like, ‘You could come over,’ and then she was like, ‘Alright.’ And she asked her mom, and her mom says, ‘No.’ She went the other way, and then I went the other way,” DeJesus said.
Short on bus fare, DeJesus started the long walk home when a maroon vehicle pulled up on the curb with Arlene Castro’s father at the wheel.
“He asks me if, 'You seen my daughter?’ I said, ‘Yeah, she’s right around the corner,’ and he was like, ‘Can you help me find her?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’”
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When they arrived at Castro’s house, he asked her for help moving some equipment. DeJesus was unnerved by his bizarre behavior.
“He was, like, fixing his eyebrows and, like, trimming his mustache and, like, cutting his nose hairs,” DeJesus said.
“He’s like, starts like, to, like, touch me and stuff, and then, I’m like, ‘What are you doing? You could go to jail?’ He just switches up like, ‘Well, OK, we’re going to, you’re going to go home now.’ He said, ‘But you can’t go through the same door you came in.’”
Castro led Gina to his basement, where she said he grabbed her and chained her up.
“He didn’t make it tight enough, so I threw it over, and then I tried to run, but he sat on my back,” DeJesus said. “And then I just start kicking him. I kicked him, and I bruised him really bad.”
As Castro overpowered her, DeJesus screamed for help, but the radio in his basement and the radio in the living room were too loud.
For the first few weeks, Castro only talked to and touched DeJesus. The first time DeJesus said he raped her was on May 7, 2004. Though she remembers the exact date, DeJesus said it was too painful to discuss the details of what happened.
Life in Captivity
At first, DeJesus was Castro’s new favorite.
“’He seems to treat me better than the other girls. I have the nicer room. He lets me eat first. I wonder if he’s kinder to me, because I'm the new girl,’” DeJesus wrote in her and Berry’s memoir, “Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland.” “’I wonder what happens, when I’m not new anymore.’”
As the “new girl,” she slowly learned about the rigid house rules that Castro ruthlessly enforced. The calculated deprivation drove the girls apart.
“It could be from getting more food, less food, different clothes. It was just simple things, but when you don’t have anything, you’re like, ‘Well, why don’t I have that? I want that.’”
Gina and Michelle room
FBI
To fill the empty hours, Berry kept a diary in notebooks, on napkins and even on fast food bags. And the black-and-white television was their only window to the outside world.
But one of the cruelest things he did, Berry and DeJesus said, was play mind games with them. At one point, DeJesus said Castro asked her to play “Russian Roulette” with him, taking turns pointing a gun at each other.
“In my head I’m like why not, I got nothing to lose,” DeJesus said.
“He went first,” she continued. “So then he pulls the trigger and nothing happens, and I think then he gives me the gun and I’m like, ‘OK, I’m about to like pull the trigger and everything,’ and he’s like, ‘let me pray for a minute.’ And I said ‘what?’ I’m like, ‘why are you going to pray?’ So he gets on his knees and he starts praying. … So then I pull the trigger and nothing happened.”
Initially, all three women were isolated in separate bedrooms on the second floor. But on May, 23, 2004, Berry and DeJesus said Castro pulled them all into one room and forced them to watch an episode of “America’s Most Wanted” together. It was about DeJesus and Berry’s missing persons’ case, and their families were interviewed. “I couldn’t stand him,” DeJesus said. “But I couldn’t, like, show it all the time. I had to act like I, I liked him and we were friends, but I really didn’t like him.”
“There was just a gate there between the doors, and we would talk through the gate,” Berry said. “And when a door was locked we would, like, slide, like, pictures and stuff under the door.”
Once, when Castro’s daughter visited, he forced all three girls to hide in the basement. Though they thought about trying to yell for help, the women didn’t.
“There was always a chance, ‘What if he killed everybody?’” DeJesus said.
Christmas 2006: Amanda Berry Gives Birth
On Berry’s 20th birthday, she realized she might be pregnant.
“I was terrified. How? I mean, I barely eat,” Berry said, “and I’m chained to a wall, and I have a bucket for a bathroom.”
On Christmas in 2006, Berry went into labor.
“He got this baby pool. And he put it on the bed ‘cause he didn’t want, you know, a mess on the bed,” said Berry.
Castro called on Knight to help deliver the baby.
“Michelle was kind of just talking to me, like, you know, ‘Relax. Calm down. You’re OK,’” Berry said. “And he sat in the rocking chair right there just reading this book about, like, birth and stuff.”
Amanda Berry tried to make her daughter Jocelyn's life normal in their room seen here.
FBI
Hours later, Jocelyn was born.
“This is his kid, you know. How do I feel about that? And she resembled him a lot, and I would look at her, and I just felt like, she’s mine. She’s mine,” Berry said.
When Jocelyn was born, DeJesus said having the little girl there with them was a welcome distraction.
“It was fun because I can get away from the situation,” DeJesus said. “When I was playing with Jocelyn, Jocelyn made me forget everything.”
As Jocelyn grew older, Castro allowed her freedoms that Berry, DeJesus and Knight were not given. Though she was locked in with the three of them whenever Castro left the house, she occasionally was allowed to go outside in the backyard, to the park or to Sunday services with her father. Castro’s love for Jocelyn seemed to turn him into a different man.
“She loved him, and he loved her,” Berry said. “I was nervous, like, would he touch her? Would he ever think about touching her because, you know, he had his problems?”
May 6, 2013: The Women Make Their Escape
After 10 years, the women finally made their escape on May 6, 2013.
“So Jocelyn goes downstairs, and then she runs back up. And she says, ‘I don’t find Daddy. Daddy’s nowhere around,’” DeJesus said.
“My heart immediately started pounding," Berry said. "because I’m like ... ‘Should I chance it? If I’m going to do it, I need to do it now.'".
For the first time in 10 years, Berry said she found her bedroom door unlocked without Castro around. Downstairs, the front door was open but wired with an alarm. Beyond it, the storm door was padlocked shut, but Berry was still able to squeeze out an arm.
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DeJesus said she thought Berry had been caught by Castro and talked Knight out of running to Berry. Outside, a neighbor saw Berry but was too afraid to intervene.
That’s when another neighbor, Charles Ramsey, showed up.
“He kind of, like, started like trying to pull on the door, but he couldn’t get it open either,” Berry said. “And so he, like, kind of kicks it, and he’s like, ‘There you go. Finish kicking it out, and you can get out.’”
After kicking the way out for her and Jocelyn, Berry called 911, and police arrived and rescued DeJesus and Knight.
“I was terrified. And just because there’s people on the street doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t hurt me. I was so terrified,” Berry said. “I still don’t know why he left that day with the door unlocked. I will never know.”
Heidi Gutman/ABC
What Life Is Like For Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus Today
On Aug. 1, 2013, Castro was sentenced to life plus 1,000 years in prison after he pled guilty to 937 counts of kidnapping and rape. On Sept. 3, 2013, he was found dead in his prison cell after committing suicide by hanging.
The two women rarely make public appearances since their escape, but have both moved on with their lives. DeJesus is in school and has her driver’s license, and Berry said life now is “great.”
Berry and DeJesus remain good friends. And though neither keeps in touch with Knight, they both wish her well.
“We just have a bright future, and [will] see what comes,” Berry said.
Two lots where abandoned homes once sat in Cleveland have been
turned into urban parks dedicated to one of the women held captive in
the neighborhood for a decade.
The parks are near the home of kidnap victim Gina DeJesus on the west
side of Cleveland. Planners tell WOIO-TV 19 that turning the areas into
parks will help DeJesus and her family heal from the emotional wounds
caused by her long captivity.
Neighbors are happy because they say the abandoned homes attracted
crime. All the resources to build the parks were donated. The dedication
was Aug. 10.
DeJesus, Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight escaped from Ariel Castro’s
home in May 2103. Castro pleaded guilty last August and committed
suicide in prison.
Ariel Castro, the man accused of holding three women captive for a decade, has agreed to life in a real prison plus 1,000 years, so he can avoid the death penalty.
Castro, who according to detailed secret chronicled diaries by all three women, attended church on Sunday before coming home to rape, beat and torture his victims, who were shackled to walls bound with duct tape or an extension cord and chained to a pole in the basement of Castro’s ram shackled house. At times he tortured them by subjecting them to the "cold of his basement" or the "heat of his attic."
At Castro’s sentencing hearing, his final court appearance, the diaries documenting their ordeal--- that had been kept secret from Castro [and the judge]--- are now introduced into evidence. Prosecutors, we are told, “relied on the diaries for many of the 977 criminal charges lodged against Castro.” Huh? “Relied on the diaries at the sentencing hearing?” A little unusual, I think you will agree.
According to a sentencing memorandum, “The entries speak of forced sexual conduct, of being locked in a dark room, of anticipating the next session of abuse, of the dreams of someday escaping and being reunited with family, of being chained to a wall and of being held like a prisoner of war.” Amanda Berry somehow found out her mother died during her captivity because her diary is addressed to “ her mother in heaven.”
Putting aside how she found out her mother died, how can you write and keep a diary secret, for ten years, when you were chained up and/or shackled, during which time you are being “viciously beaten, repeatedly raped, and “treated like an animal in a dark room, anticipating the next session of abuse?”
Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight
Michele Knight, now 32, and the first of the three women to be kidnapped, was in a store asking for directions when Castro offered to give her a ride but then tricked her into coming to his house to pick out a puppy for her son, Joey, now living in foster care. In an ironic twist, Knight’s parents are the subject of a federal probe for cashing Michele’s Social Security checks while she was imprisoned all these years.
Amanda Berry, a day before her 17th birthday, thought she was getting a ride home after her shift at a Burger King was over.
Gina De Jesus, now 23, went home with him because he told her he needed help carrying a speaker to his car.
The three young girls disappeared and lived within blocks of one another in the same low-income neighborhood. They were kept locked up for 10 years in Castro’s house, also in the same neighborhood.
Castro’s son wrote a story about one of the girls and all of the girls were friends with one of Castro’s daughters by his first marriage. We aren’t told which one. One daughter, Emily, was convicted of slashing her 11-month-old daughter's throat and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The other, Annie Gregg, never wants to see him again.
Castro is a sex addicted evil genius who avoided authorities for the last decade and only likes to rape and beat women when they are wearing a motorcycle helmet.
The three women were confined in 1,436 square feet of this clapboard house with one bathroom for 10 years. Castro wired up the place with alarm clocks "in a makeshift manner" to create an alarm system to turn the house into a makeshift prison.
The women were kept in two rooms behind doors and curtains that could be secured from the outside with a lock, and a circular hole cut towards the bottom of the door so the women wouldn’t suffocate. The windows were boarded up with very heavy closet doors on the inside and plastic bags on the outside.
Anyone who came to visit, like the police, his two daughters, or his brothers, were kept in the kitchen. No one was able to detect the three women and a six-year-old girl, because Castro cleverly blocked visibility to the rest of the house with curtains that he explained, “were installed as an energy saving device.” Apparently, the curtains also served to sound proof the house because neither the brothers, the daughters, nor the police ever heard the screams for help from the three women behind the curtains.
His daughter Annie, who knew her "daddy" as a "friendly, caring, doting man,” visited him at the House of Horrors, during the ten years the three women were kidnapped, held captive, raped and beaten. She wants to know "how could you be so good to us, but (allegedly) take young women, little girls, someone else's babies, away from these families?”
My question for Annie is, “How could you” not know what was going on when you went visiting to his make-shift prison and didn’t think anything out of the ordinary was going on in her childhood torture chamber home? For example according to your CNN interview:
He would take forever to come to the door," and “always had the house locked up tight.
Once inside, visits were fun and cordial. Gregg, her husband and Castro "ate, looked at photos and listened to music," she said. "He appeared to be happy to see us and never rushed for us to leave." But at times, he would disappear from dinner and give no explanation for his absence.
The music was usually turned up loud, but Gregg thought this to be fitting since Castro was a musician.
Once she asked if she could go upstairs to see her childhood bedroom. Castro coaxed her out of the idea, telling her, "Oh, honey, there's so much junk up there. You don't want to go up there," she said.
The basement was always locked.
Castro and Amanda a Match made in Hell
DNA tests confirmed that the six-year-old, born four years after her mother’s captivity, is Castro’s daughter. Castro, we are told, loves his little girl “dearly” and the child, we are also told, misses her father.
Here are current pictures of the three women.
According to doctors, they are all in surprising excellent physical and mental health, considering they were only allowed outside the house twice during their capture and fed McDonalds once a day for the last 10 years.
The horrific experience of being repeatedly raped “vaginally, orally and anally wearing motorcycle helmets” without access to the one bathroom in the house [each of them had a plastic toilet that was rarely emptied] finally came to an end when one of the next door neighbors, after 10 years, finally heard one of the women screaming and asking for help to get out of the clap trap house.
Amanda Berry, dressed in pajamas and sandals, was having trouble kicking a hole big enough in the front door [or front screen door] for her and her daughter to escape through to freedom.
An image of the door is below.
The neighbor, Ramsey Clark, who lived across the street, helped Amanda and her daughter kick a big enough hole in the door. She then borrowed his cell phone and called 911, “Hello it’s me, help me, I’m Amanda Berry! ” One has to wonder why it took 10 years for anyone to hear the three women screaming to get out of their hell or why it took them so long to finally kick in the front door. One has to also wonder why none of the women never picked up the phone in the house to dial 911. Yes, the Castro home at 2207 Sycamore Street had a landline.
Anyway, Amanda then tells the 911 operator that, “I need police … I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years and I’m here, I’m free now.” However, as implausible as it may seem, Amandadoesn’t go back in the house to tell Knight and De Jesus they can finally escape Castro’s makeshift prison. And even more beyond belief, is how effective Castro’s sound proof curtains were at separating the up from the downstairs of the 1,436 square feet House of Horrors.
The two women are upstairs, unbound, and don’t hear a thing until the police enter the house and make a lot noise walking upstairs. When Ms. Knight realizes it’s the police, she “literally launched herself” into an officer’s arms, and just kept repeating, ‘You saved us! You saved us!’”
Saved us?
Not according to Castro. After he was arrested, he declared his innocence of any criminal activity and tells the police he is not a violent person and objects to being painted as a monster because he is also a victim. Castro claimed he was “abused as a child and addicted to porn.” Now shackled himself, unshaven and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, he accused the three women of lying about being raped and tortured. He tells the media that, "Most of the sex that went on in the house, and probably all of it, was consensual" [with or without the motorcycle helmet]. "As God is my witness, I never beat these women like they're trying to say that I did. I never tortured them," we all lived in “a lot of harmony."
He is even upset with the FBI for not thoroughly investigating the abductions. Huh?
Of course, we may never know the real truth behind this made for TV drama because when he agreed to spend 1,000 years in prison the women won’t have to testify under oath about their ten-year-ordeal.
When Castro wasn’t raping the three women, he was playing the bass guitarat clubs, churches and cultural celebrations or attending barbecues at the neighbors on holidays.
I am trying to decide which part of this story is more unbelievable:
That these three women, after being kept locked up by a bus driver and erstwhile musician in a ram shackled, 1,436 square foot, one-bathroom house built in 1890, would not have escaped or committed suicide after 10 weeks, let alone 10 years of beatings, rape [forced oral anal and vaginal sex] and torture is unmitigated nonsense. However, what is even more difficult to believe is that any of the three of them would have asked for, let alone agreed to, consensual sex [with or without a helmet] with an overweight loser who fed them McDonald's once a day for 10 years.
Is there any woman who could live through getting pregnant four times in 10 years, and each time aborted because she was either punched or kicked in the stomach, which caused her to fall down the stairs on her way to the kitchen to be starved or forced to eat rotten food?
The story might make a little more sense if the Castro brothers, who were arrested but later released, had been involved. Initially it was thought that all the Castro brothers forced the three women to have sex, resulting in up to five pregnancies and four abortions due to beating the women when they got pregnant, according to a report by Cleveland's WKYC-TV.
I don’t know what was really going on during the 10 years these three women were missing, but I am pretty sure there is a third story.
Then we have to reconcile Castro’s criminal record and his repeated encounters with the Cleveland Police, who never heard the three women screaming when they were being raped and tortured during the 10 years.
Neighbors claim they called the cops on Castro for stealing a chain link fence and suspicious activity for years, only to have police ignore them.
The Cleveland Police Department itself disputes the claims, saying its records indicate officers had visited the Seymour Avenue residence only twice before this week: Once, to respond to a street fight that Ariel Castro, the lead kidnapping suspect, had called in himself, and once again to investigate allegations, later proven false, that Castro had briefly abducted a little boy when he was still employed as a bus driver in 2004. The police went to the house to investigate but the women inside weren’t screaming for help so they left.
Ask yourself this simple question. You kidnapped three women and are keeping them locked up in your ram shackled house with paper thin walls. Would you actually call the police and complain about a street fight in front of your house?
Castro does have a record of assault. His ex-wife, Grimilda Figueroa, who died last year, accused Castro of assault in 1989, 1993 and again in 2005, three years after he allegedly abducted his first victim Michelle Knight. Castro was "a monster," according to Figueroa's family members who spoke to ABC News last week on the condition of anonymity. Figueroa's family members might just be a little prejudiced against their former son-in-law, when they tell reporters that Castro was arrested for "throwing his wife [their daughter] to the ground, hitting her about the head and face and kicking her body."
Castro was arrested, but it appears Figueroa dropped the charges against him because the fight with Figueroa was about her refusal to testify against her then boyfriend Fernando Colon. Colon was convicted in 2004 of raping Castro’s two young daughters.
There are some who believe the House of Horrors nightmare might not have ended if Castro hadn’t lost his job as a bus driver last year.
First, he got a 60-day suspension for making a U-turn in rush-hour with his bus packed with students; and later, the neighbors complained that he used the school bus for personal use when he parked the bus in front of his house to unload bags-full of McDonald's fast food.
The neighbors called the Police because they thought it was “unusual” that he needed so much food.
The Police showed up, but according to the record, they knocked on the door and when no one answered and/or they didn’t hear anyone screaming to be “freed” from captivity inside, they didn't enter the home.
There were other calls about the unusual goings-on in the Castro house. Like the time the neighbors called the police because they saw a naked women being led on a leash in the yard, or a baby banging on one of the house's windows as if it was trying to escape. According to neighbors, the police showed up, but when they knocked on the door and no one answered or screamed, “Let me out I am a sex slave,” they left.
Post-traumatic Stress
While the three victims appear to be physically and mentally healthy after their freedom from the House of Horrors, adjusting to normal life is going to be difficult. "It's going to be a long-term struggle," said psychologist Rona Fields, who has treated torture victims.
Fields and Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist who specializes in adaptation to stressful environments, expect the trio will experience post-traumatic stress, self-esteem problems and difficulty making decisions. They also may have trouble reconnecting with family members they haven't seen in years. "I would like to be able to say, 'Oh, they are going to be fine. My advice would be to let them get used to things gradually."
Amanda Berry didn’t heed their advice. Here she is making her first public appearance at a Music Festival.
And finally, there’s a dog story sure to make you tear up. Ariel Castro owned at least three dogs [we are not told if they were indoor or outdoors dogs] that are now impounded and living in an animal shelter. While Amanda, Gina and Michele begin to enjoy their freedom and heal from their horrific ordeal, the dogs that were imprisoned with them are suffering in judicial limbo on a special FBI hold. However, there is hope for one of the dogs. The Cleveland police officer, who wished to remain unnamed, revealed that "one of the dogs and one of the victims bonded during their captivity.”
If you can figure out how a woman who is beaten, raped and tortured when she isn’t shackled to the wall can form a bond with one of Castro’s dogs, let me know.
Berry and DeJesus together wrote their memoir, “Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland,” with Washington Post journalists Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan, and it was released on April 27. The two young women say they have since moved on with their lives.
