Amanda Berry was screaming into the fresh air, trying to claw her way out of the confines of 2207 Seymour Avenue. It was May 6 and countless lives were about to be irrevocably altered.
Charles Ramsey heard her screaming for help. Charles Ramsey happened to be in the right place at the right time - a point of fate that strung together 10 years of mystery and pain and hope.
Cleveland police began making their way toward the otherwise quiet thoroughfare that shoots off of West 25th Street, just a stone’s throw from I-90. The wreck of a home stood tall in the late afternoon light, almost bracing for the grand reveal of all the secrets waiting within. Soon enough, two other women emerged from the home, and internationally breaking news began spreading a message of joy around the world. Three long-missing women had been found. Alive. Relatively healthy and coherent.
Ariel Castro, 52, and his brothers Pedro and Onil were arrested following the rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. (May 8 Update: Ariel was charged with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape - all first-degree felonies. Pedro and Onil were not charged with anything.) Ariel owned the Seymour Avenue home where the women had been kept. Police sources paint a grim picture of chains, restraints, locked doors, and rape.
“Those guys were walking out of the house with 1,000-yard stares,” said one source.
The details surrounding who knew what in the neighborhood and within the Castro family remain murky at best. But the investigation is plowing on this week, thanks to bravery from unsuspecting corners.
For Amanda’s actions and Charles’s quick assistance, both are lauded as heroes in the community.
But it’s unclear whether their rescue needed to wait so long. Leads came and went during the past decade.
Israel Lugo, a neighbor, told MSNBC that he summoned cops in 2011 after “his sister spotted a woman with a baby in the home, banging on the window ‘like she wants to get out.’”
"The cops came,” he said. “They pounded on that man’s door around 15, 20 times, real hard. They looked in the driveway, they got back in the squad car and left."
“Every single lead was followed up no matter how small,” Cleveland police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said during a press conference.
But lingering loose ends remain as law enforcement officials, family members, neighbors and investigators work to meld the disparate pieces of this puzzle.
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Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, as sources put it, were close with the Castro family. Emily and Arlene Castro were similar in age to the girls, and they often hung out in the neighborhood.
“These kids all knew each other,” private investigator Chris Giannini says. During and after the girls’ disappearances, in 2004, he employed a man named Fernando Colon - Ariel Castro’s ex-wife’s husband - as a security site supervisor at a local shopping center and got to know the inner workings of the family fairly well.
Colon had fallen under the suspicions of the FBI during their investigation into DeJesus’s whereabouts. By way of marriage, he was somewhat close to the Castro family, and his step-daughters certainly ran in the same circles at the missing teenager. Colon was soon brought in for questioning regarding the disappearances.
But he was cleared following a polygraph test. The man in turn insisted that FBI agents look into Ariel Castro, a man who seemed to attract tumult and disorder throughout his adult life.
“They did not follow up on that,” Giannini says. The Cleveland Division of the FBI offered no comment on the matter when contacted by Scene.
It was 2004, still within the first year of DeJesus’s disappearance. She, along with Berry and Knight, were still regular fixtures in local conversation. Within the Castro family, however, turmoil was bubbling. As Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight grew up painfully inside Ariel Castro’s home, he was fighting to keep the eye of the law far away.
Emily and Arlene Castro, teenagers themselves, did not live with their father. Their mother, Grimilda Figueroa, had married Colon and brought her daughters to live with them over on West 110th Street. Allegations of sexual molestation against Colon soon threatened the stability of the household. Law enforcement once again zeroed in on Fernando Colon, all while Ariel Castro egged them onward. As his daughters continued to accuse Colon of touching them inappropriately - of penetrating them - Ariel Castro began visiting them more frequently and showering them uncharacteristically with gifts. They didn’t spend much time at Castro’s Seymour Avenue house, though. He ensured that much.
The Castro girls’ mother did not believe their mostly frantic allegations. Nor did their older brother, Ariel “Anthony” Castro. Nonetheless, Colon was indicted in late 2004 on 27 criminal charges, including kidnapping and gross sexual imposition, and later offered a light sentence that he couldn’t realistically appeal. Ariel Castro had testified against him in the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. His wife and Castro’s son had testified on his behalf, hoping to clear Colon’s name in this increasing confusing tangle of allegations. Colon’s wife repeatedly told investigators that there was no credence to any of the charges.
This personal history is resurfacing following the arrest of Ariel and his brothers, mostly because it paints one of the few concrete images of life within the family. Ariel Castro had free range of the Seymour Avenue house — his son told the Daily Mail that his father kept the basement, garage, and attic locked and off-limits — and keeping his three kidnapped victims quietly within became a simple task.
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"Words can't even explain," Tasheena Mitchell, Berry's cousin, told Scene as she gathered with hundreds of neighbors and family members outside MetroHealth Medical Center Monday night. She was nearly shaking at times.
