Missing for a Decade

Breann Cooper

Every parent’s worst night mare, your child is abducted and for years you wrestle with praying for their safety and them being alive and praying that you could just get the body back for closure. A top of that is the impossibility most feel of finding an abducted youth alive especially after ten years add to that two more girls and you have a recipe for the incredible.

Incredible is exactly what happened Monday, May 6th. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight, and two young children where rescued from a Cleveland, Ohio home by neighbor Charles Ramsey.
Ramsey stated in an interview with Cleveland’s Channel 5 ABC News that he heard a woman screaming and went to investigate. He found Amanda Berry screaming at the door of the house next door and when he approached she begged him to get her out. Thinking it nothing more than a domestic dispute, he kicked in the bottom half of the door after discovering that it would not open more than enough to stick an arm out.

Ramsey says Amanda and a young girl, presumably her 6 year old daughter, emerged from the home asking him to call 9-1-1, telling him and dispatchers “”I’m Amanda Berry. … I’ve been kidnapped, and I’ve been missing for 10 years. And I’m here. I’m free now.”

Berry alerted police that two other women where in the house, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Ramsey says he did not know who he had rescued at the time but, “when she told me it didn’t register until I got to calling 9-1-1. Then I’m like I’m calling 9-1-1 for Amanda Berry? I thought this girl was dead!”

Ramsey also stated that he knew the neighbor, as well as one can know a neighbor, he had lived next to for a year. Three men have been arrested in the case; Ariel Castro, 52, owner of the house and until November he was employed as a school bus driver, Pedro Castro, 54, and Onil Castro, 50. Little else has been released about the men.

Amanda Berry disappeared April 21, 2003 after leaving her job at Burger King on foot. Her mother died March 2, 2003 of heart failure two years after consulting psychic Sylvia Brown on the Montel Williams shows and being told her daughter was dead. Relatives say she died of a broken heart.

Gina DeJesus was abducted the following year when she was just fourteen on April 2, 2004 while walking home from middle school roughly in the same area as Amanda’s disappearance. Little is known about Michelle Knight’s disappeared only that she presumably disappeared August 22, 2002 after losing custody of her son. Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba admits that little is known in Knight’s case but that her story is “going to come out.” Time can only tell in this case as this is a developing story.

Photo Credit:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57583620/michelle-knight-told-cops-ariel-castro-threatened-to-kill-her-if-amanda-berrys-baby-died/