Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were held captive for more than 9 years by Ariel Castro and endured unimaginable abuse.
ABC News' Robin Roberts conducts the first broadcast interview with Cleveland kidnapping survivors, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus.
In April 2003, Castro kidnapped 16-year-old Amanda Berry as she was walking home from her job at Burger King. “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.”“He took me to the basement and he taped my wrists and he taped my ankles and he put on a belt around my ankles over the tape,” 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. “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.Meanwhile, Berry’s dark and filthy room at Castro’s house was about the size of a closet.
In April 2003, Castro kidnapped 16-year-old Amanda Berry as she was walking home from her job at Burger King.“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.“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.
As DeJesus continued her journey home, a maroon vehicle pulled up on the curb with Arlene’s father at the wheel. “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.’”
“He, would take my hair and like, put it in his mouth. … I don’t know why he did it but it was gross,” she said. She said that at first, Castro took special care to keep the girls divided and did not permit them to talk. “I just broke down crying because I couldn’t believe she said that,” Berry said. “And then my mom broke down crying, so that hurt even worse.”
“She was about 2, almost 3 years old, and he finally took the chains off of me. And that was because of Jocelyn.”Though she was locked in with the three of them whenever Castro left the house, Jocelyn 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 with her.
DeJesus said she thought Berry had been caught by Castro and talked Knight out of running to Berry. Berry said someone passing by outside saw her, but did not intervene.A general view of the exterior of the house where, on Monday, three women who had disappeared as teenagers approximately ten years ago were found alive on May 7, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio.
DeJesus remembered it took her “a while to come out” of her room because she didn’t believe the police were really there. Berry now works with a local news station covering missing children and adults in the Cleveland area.
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