Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland

by Amanda Berry

  “Okay, and what’s your address?”

  “2207 Seymour Avenue.”

  “2207 Seymour. Looks like you’re calling me from 2210.”

  “Huh?”

  “Looks like you’re calling me from 2210.”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “It looks like you are calling me from 2210 Seymour.”

  “I’m across the street; I’m using the phone.”

  “Okay, stay there with those neighbors. Talk to the police when they get there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, talk to the police when they get there.”

  “Okay. Hello?”

  “Yeah, talk to the police when they get there.”

  “Okay, are they on their way right now? I need them now!”

  “We’re going to send them as soon as we get a car open.”

  “No, I need them now before he gets back!”

  “All right, we’re sending them, okay?”

  “Okay, I mean, like . . .”

  “Who’s the guy you’re trying—who’s the guy who went out?”

  “Um, his name is Ariel Castro.”

  “All right. How old is he?”

  “He’s like fifty-two.”

  “All right, and uh—”

  “I’m Amanda Berry! I’ve been on the news for the last ten years!”

  “Okay, I got that, dear. And, you say, what was his name again?”

  “Uh, Ariel Castro.”

  “And is he white, black, or Hispanic?”

  “He’s Hispanic.”

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “I don’t know! ’Cause he’s not here right now! That’s why I ran away!”

  “When he left, what was he wearing?”

  “Who knows!”

  “The police are on their way; talk to them when they get there.”

  “Huh? I need—okay.”

  “I told you they’re on their way; talk to them when they get there, okay?”

  “All right, okay.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Bye.”

  Maybe three minutes pass before the first police car pulls up. Before it even stops I run over to it, yelling at the cop who’s driving, “I’m Amanda Berry!”

  Two officers step out of the car, and one of them says into the radio that they found Amanda Berry.

  “Is there anybody else inside?” he asks me, with a startled look on his face.

  “Yes!” I shout. “There are two more girls in there!”

  They look shocked and they start running toward the house.

  “Wait! Can you please put us in the car or something, in case he comes back?” I’m terrified, and Joce is still out-of-control crying, so they tell us to sit in the back of the cruiser.

  By now the whole street has begun filling up with police cars, and cops are running everywhere. Some of them are breaking the storm door open and going inside.

  A cop comes to take me and Joce out of the police car and walks us over to an ambulance, and we sit inside.

  There are so many cops here now. He can’t get to us anymore.

  Gina

  We hear sirens outside, but I don’t pay any attention. We’ve been hearing them for years, and they never come for us.

  A couple of minutes pass, and then we hear somebody climbing the stairs.

  “Shut this door!” I tell Michelle. “I think he’s coming for us.”

  We’re terrified. We close the door and throw our weight against it. There’s no way we’re strong enough to keep him out, but we have to try. What is he going to do to us?

  Somebody in the hall is shouting: “Cleveland police! Cleveland police!”

  Michelle pushes the door open and runs through Amanda’s room and into the hallway. I hear her yelling, “You saved us! You saved us!”

  I’m still hanging back, just out of sight inside Amanda’s room. Maybe they are fake cops. Maybe it’s just some of his friends in costumes.

  I peek around the corner and see two cops in uniform, a man and a woman.

  Michelle has jumped up into the man’s arms, and she’s holding on tight. Then he gently puts her down, and she jumps up onto the female officer, shouting hysterically, “Please don’t let me go! Please don’t let me go!”

  “I’m not letting you go,” I hear the officer say.

  I look out from the corner a little more, real slow, and I meet eyes with the guy cop.

  “What’s your name?” he asks me.

  “Gina DeJesus,” I tell him.

  He looks like he doesn’t believe me, so I say my full name.

  “My name is Georgina DeJesus.”

  He looks as if he’s just seen a ghost and says into his radio, “We found them! We found them!” Then he stares at me for a while and says, “We’ve been looking for you for a really long time.”

  They keep telling us that we’re safe now, but I’m still not sure.

  “Do you know who kidnapped you? What does he look like? Is that him?”

  They’re pointing to a picture on Amanda’s wall, but it’s Amanda’s dad, not him.

  “If you want pictures of him, you have to go downstairs to the kitchen and look on the refrigerator,” I tell them.

  I take them downstairs to show them. There are cops all over the house. When we get to the kitchen, Michelle is already there, pointing out the photos.

  We ask if we can go upstairs to get a couple of things, so they take us. I grab my blue book bag, which is filled with a lot of my drawings and letters. I want to show them to my mom and dad. I want to take some of the clothes that I sewed myself, but I don’t have time to grab them, because they are hurrying us outside.

  We walk through the front door, which is all smashed up. There are so many people outside, cop cars and flashing lights everywhere.

  It’s so bright that it hurts my eyes.

  Amanda

  The cops bring Gina and Michelle into the ambulance. Michelle’s very emotional and is lying on a gurney, having trouble breathing. Paramedics in light blue gloves are telling her to calm down and breathe slowly.

  I’m just sitting here with Joce, watching them, with Gina next to us.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” Gina says to me. “I was worried you got hurt.”

  The ambulance crew puts a black band on my arm to take my blood pressure, and it nearly squeezes my arm off. We haven’t been to a doctor in ten years. Joce has never even met one.

  A guy comes into the ambulance and tells us that he’s an FBI agent, and that his name is Andy Burke. “You guys look the same,” he says, smiling. “The only thing is that you look a lot thinner. We’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  A nice police officer named Barb Johnson then joins him.

  “So,” she asks me, “you’re really Amanda Berry?”

  “Yes, I am,” I tell her.

  It feels strange after so many years to talk to a total stranger.

  “Who’s this little girl?”

  “This is my daughter, Jocelyn.”

  Joce has calmed down now and she’s looking around in amazement at everything and everybody in the ambulance.

  “So this is his daughter?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re really Gina DeJesus?” she asks Gina.

  “Yeah,” Gina says.

  She’s smiling. I haven’t seen Gina smile in months.

  Gina

  “You did this? You got us out?” I ask Amanda, sitting next to me in the ambulance.

  “Yeah, I did,” she says. “I was so scared. Then I thought of my mom and my sister and I couldn’t let any more time go by. So I did it.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me for help?” I ask her.

  “Because if
I got caught, I wanted it to be me alone,” she says. “I didn’t want him to catch you, too.”

  Wait until he finds out it was Amanda who got us out.

  “It’s the one you trust most that screws you over in the end,” I tell her.

  We both laugh at that. It feels real good to laugh.

  The cops are looking for him, and they tell us we never have to see him again.

  Jocelyn has calmed down now and is happily babbling and excited about being inside an ambulance. She’s trying to show me something, but when I don’t pay attention, I hear her say: “Gina! Gina!”

  It’s the first time she has ever said my real name. She must have heard the police say it.

  I’m not Chelsea anymore. I am free.

  It seems like it takes forever, but the ambulance starts moving.

  We drive to the corner and turn left.

  We are off Seymour Avenue, finally and forever.*

  Part Four

  May 6, 2013: Arrest

  Dan Brill and Mike Hageman were taking a domestic violence report on West 47th Street when their radios started buzzing.

  The two veteran police officers looked at each other: The radio traffic was urgent; something unusual was happening. Hageman stepped outside the house to listen as Brill finished taking the woman’s statement.

  “It sounds like they found Amanda Berry,” Hageman said when Brill returned to the car.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Brill said.

  Nearly every cop on the west side of Cleveland knew Amanda Berry’s name and face. For ten years, her photo had been up on the wall of the Second District headquarters, on telephone poles, and on highway billboards. Everyone wanted to believe she was still alive, but cops know these long-term missing-person cases typically end when someone discovers bones.

  But now the excited chatter on the police radio was saying that Amanda Berry was alive and safe on Seymour Avenue, just a few minutes away.

  “Be advised, suspect Ariel Castro, fifty-two-year-old Hispanic male, is driving a blue Mazda Miata convertible,” the dispatcher announced.

  Brill and Hageman knew that half the police cars in Cleveland were already on Seymour Avenue, so they decided to look for the Miata. They started driving east on Clark Avenue, a busy main road not far from Castro’s house. And there it was: just up ahead, a blue Miata was pulling up to a stop sign with two Hispanic males in their fifties in the two-seater convertible.

  As the police moved closer, the driver of the Miata saw the cruiser and made eye contact with the officers. Brill and Hageman were waiting for “the look,” the expression they see on the faces of car thieves, drunk drivers, or any other driver who doesn’t want to attract police attention: a guilty look, then a careful effort to direct their attention anywhere but at the officers.

  The Miata driver did none of that. He seemed totally calm.

  He headed down Clark Avenue and then turned right into a McDonald’s parking lot.

  Brill radioed in the license plate: FHY4669.

  The confirmation came quickly: It was Castro’s 1993 Miata. “That’s the male we’re looking for,” the dispatcher said.

  The officers pulled up directly behind the car and turned on their overhead flashing lights. The two men in the car turned around, clearly bewildered. Hageman and Brill approached them, asked for IDs, and told them to keep their hands in plain sight. Ariel Castro was the driver, and his brother, Onil, was in the passenger seat with a dog on his lap. The cops ordered them out of the car.

  Ariel said nothing, but Onil seemed confused. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What did Pedro do?”

  Onil told the officers that if their brother Pedro, who had a severe drinking problem, had gotten into some kind of trouble, they could find him at his house, where he lived with their mother. He demanded to be released.

  “We will explain this all to you,” Brill said. “But right now we need you to cooperate with us.”

  Onil was still holding the dog, and the officers saw that there was another dog in a plastic milk crate in the space behind the seats. Onil was still complaining loudly about being stopped when the officers told him to put both dogs in the crate.

  As they handcuffed both men, Ariel Castro was silent.

  Officer Tom Connole pulled up in a second patrol car and quietly updated Brill and Hageman: “He held three girls kidnapped for ten years. One of the other ones is Gina DeJesus.”

  Brill was shocked. Not only was Amanda alive, but so was Gina, whose disappearance was just as well-known in Cleveland. So they had been together all these years.

  The officers put Onil in their patrol car and Ariel in Connole’s vehicle. They were each read their Miranda rights, and when Ariel Castro was told he was being held on suspicion of kidnapping, he seemed stunned. He started to speak, but then stopped and slouched down in the patrol car.

  The brothers were taken to the Second District police headquarters, a five-minute drive from Castro’s home, and locked up separately. Ariel Castro was placed in Cell 22, a tiny room with a concrete floor and yellow brick walls. Previous occupants of the cell had scratched their colorful street names into the bars over the years: Baldy D, Bobby 104, Lil Bryan. Castro sat there silently. In another cell across the room, Onil was mouthing off to the officers, demanding to be freed and insisting he had done nothing wrong.

  Police had found their brother Pedro passed out drunk in his backyard and arrested him as well. He now lay on the floor of a third cell, still sleeping it off.

  All three men were given dark blue “paper suits,” which are generally used for prisoners who are a suicide risk. The police had taken that precaution because the case was so extraordinary and was already drawing overwhelming media attention. Onil was furious about being forced to change clothes, but Ariel quietly slipped into the outfit while officers changed the unconscious Pedro.

  The Cleveland police and FBI did not want to make any procedural missteps in such a high-profile case, so they decided to wait until the next morning to question the suspects. For the next few hours, until well after midnight when Castro was transferred downtown to the Justice Center lockup, police, FBI agents, and other officials came to his cell door to catch a glimpse of the man accused of such breathtaking crimes. Throughout it all Castro sat silently on a wooden chair beneath the cell’s neon light.

  He never asked a single question about why he was being held.

  May 6, 2013: Reunion

  At the moment Amanda was kicking out the door of 2207 Seymour Avenue, Nancy Ruiz was preparing dinner for her sister Janice three blocks down the street. Janice lived there with two other sisters, a nephew, and his family. She had suffered a stroke a week earlier and had been released from the hospital that afternoon. The house had been in the family for about fifty years, and its fresh white paint and tidy yard made it stand out on an otherwise run-down block.

  Nancy was cooking a chicken stew while Janice rested in her bedroom. Her doctors had said that Janice needed quiet, so Nancy had drawn the curtains and shut off her phone and the TV to make sure nothing disturbed her.

  Outside, though, Nancy heard a commotion—sirens and people shouting. She didn’t think much of it, but then the door swung open and her older sister Sandra burst in and shouted, “They found three girls in a basement down the street!”

  Nancy froze.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Is it Gina?”

  “I don’t know,” Sandra said. “But we have to go!”

  They took off down the street and parked near the corner of West 25th Street, right behind Cesi Castro’s Caribe Grocery. Cesi and his wife, Norma, were standing outside the market watching the chaotic scene—police cars with flashing lights, TV satellite trucks, a gathering crowd.

  As she passed, Nancy quickly hugged Norma, whom she had known since she was a teenager, and began running toward the police cars. She
ducked under the yellow crime-scene tape and saw Andy Burke, an FBI agent who had been working on Gina’s case from the beginning.

  “Please,” she said to him, “just tell me! Is it Gina?”

  “Yes, it is,” Burke said.

  “Oh, my God!” Nancy shouted. “Oh, my God! They said there’s a baby. Is it hers?”

  “No,” he told her, “it’s not hers.”

  She fell into his arms and they both started crying. “They’re in that ambulance right there,” Burke said, pointing toward the emergency vehicle pulling away down the street.

  “You have to go to Metro Hospital,” Burke told her. “That’s where she’s going.”

  Cleveland Deputy Police Chief Edward J. Tomba, who had just arrived, put Nancy and Sandra into his cruiser and tore off, sirens blaring, toward the hospital.

  Gina

  We’ve only been in the ambulance for a few minutes when we pull up to Metro Hospital. They wheel Michelle in on the gurney, but Amanda and I walk, and she’s carrying Jocelyn.

  I was sick so many times inside that house and wanted to go to a doctor, but now here I am at this huge hospital, and all I want to do is stay outside and breathe the fresh air for hours.

  Doctors lead us into a big room with three beds that says TRAUMA 16 and TRAUMA 17 over its doors. The whole wall is glass, so we can sit on the beds and see the nurses’ station and all the doctors and cops rushing around.

  They put Amanda and Jocelyn on the bed at one end, Michelle in the middle, and me on the third and pull curtains around each of us. A doctor examines me and tells me I weigh a hundred pounds—thirty pounds less than when I was kidnapped. Then I hear a voice I haven’t heard in nine years.

  “Gina!”

  It’s my mom.

  A cop is helping her make her way to me because she almost fainted when she saw me.

  “Hi, Mommy,” I say, very quietly.

  Neither of us knows what else to say, so we just hold each other. My mom keeps looking at me and touching me, checking me out to make sure I’m really okay. She’s smiling and crying at the same time.

  A few minutes later my dad runs in and hugs me, and then my sister Mayra.