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Suspect in Cleveland Kidnapping Had Contact With Police Suspect in Cleveland Kidnapping Had Contact With Police
(34 minutes later)
CLEVELAND — The police had been called two times to a house where three young women from Cleveland, who disappeared about a decade ago and who friends and relatives feared were gone forever, were found on Monday, the authorities said on Tuesday. In 2000, the owner of the house, Ariel Castro, had called the police about a fight in the street. In 2004, the authorities interviewed Mr. Castro, a driver, after he “inadvertently” left a child on a school bus. CLEVELAND — One neighbor remembered occasional late-night deliveries of groceries to the boarded-up shoebox of a house in a rough-edged West Side neighborhood here.
Neither of those visits by the authorities resulted in any arrests, nor was there any indication about the dramatic discovery for which Mr. Castro is now being held. But at a news conference on Tuesday, the police and investigators said that they were slowly starting to unravel the thread of events that led up to the escape of the women after one of them, Amanda Berry, tried to force her way through the front door of the house on Seymour Avenue. Another remarked on a porch light that burned at night, even though many of the windows were covered.
On Tuesday the authorities said Mr. Castro, 52, was one of those arrested in connection with the case. Two of his brothers, Pedro, 54, and On-il, 50, were also arrested. “Why would an abandoned house have a porch light on?” he recalled thinking at the time.
The saga started to unfold on Monday when Ms. Berry told a dispatcher that she had been kidnapped and pleaded for the police to come before the man who was holding her captive returned. The 911 call was released by the authorities to local news media. Still another said his sister had once seen a figure in an upstairs window, pounding on the glass.
“I’m Amanda Berry, I’ve been on the news for the last 10 years,” she said. On Tuesday, a stunned neighborhood learned that these were glimpses of a horrifying truth. For about a decade, the police said, three women were imprisoned inside the home at 2207 Seymour Avenue.
Angel Cordero, 32, was heading to his car when he heard a woman scream, “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years.” A neighbor, Charles Ramsey, told local television reporters that the screams drew him to the house as well. Those years of captivity ended late Monday when Amanda Berry, who had not been seen since she left her job at a Burger King on April, 21, 2003, when she was 17, appeared at the front door of the house accompanied by a young child and screamed: “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years!”
“She had the door open a crack, but there was a chain she could not open,” Mr. Cordero said. After two neighbors freed her by kicking in the chained front door and helped her make an urgent call to 911, three men were arrested in connection with the case — Ariel Castro, 52, the owner of the house, and his brothers, Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50. Ms. Berry and the child, along with Gina DeJesus, who disappeared while walking home from middle school in 2004, and Michelle Knight, who vanished at age 20 in 2002, were treated at an area hospital and reunited with their families.
Mr. Cordero said that both men kicked through the door as a woman screamed, “Open the door, open the door, he is coming back.” Ms. Berry came out with a little girl in plastic shoes and ran to a house across the street. The conditions in the home, a law enforcement official said, were “abysmal at best.”
“She looked dirty and was screaming,” Mr. Cordero said, referring to Ms. Berry. “She had on green pants and a small white shirt and old-looking shoes. Her teeth were yellow and dirty and her hair looked messy, as well.” “They had no ability to leave the home or interact with anyone other than each other, the child and the suspect,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.
“The baby was crying a lot and was very nervous,” he said. “She probably never saw a car or anything before.” Another official said the F.B.I. had begun questioning the women late Tuesday and had taken photos and helped collect evidence from the house.
The police arrived shortly thereafter. The case recalled other kidnappings, like that of Jaycee Dugard, who was held prisoner in California for 18 years; Elizabeth Smart, who spent nine months in torment after being grabbed from her bedroom in Salt Lake City by Brian David Mitchell; and six women who were snatched, held and tortured in Belgium in the mid-1990s.
“I did not go inside the house because I thought he would kill me,” Mr. Cordero said. “These are some of the most catastrophic kinds of experiences a human being can be subjected to,” said Kris Mohandie, a forensic psychologist who has been a consultant in other long-term kidnapping cases.
On Tuesday, the police in Cleveland said they still had to fully interview Ms. Berry and the other two women, as well as the suspects, to get a complete picture of why and how they ended up in the house. Gina DeJesus, who along with Ms. Berry had been missing since she was a teenager, and Michelle Knight who was 20 when she vanished, followed Ms. Berry out of the house after the police arrived. The perpetrators of such crimes, Dr. Mohandie said, have been men “who have had longstanding fantasies of capturing, controlling, abusing and dominating women.”
Chief Michael McGrath, of the Cleveland Division of Police, said it was because of Ms. Berry’s “brave actions” that the other two women were able to escape as well. Such men, he said, use a perverse system of rewards and punishments to create fear and submission in their victims, who quickly lose all sense of self and become dependent on their captors. “Total control over another human being is what stimulates them,” he said.
Also in the house was the girl, a 6-year old, believed to be Ms. Berry’s daughter. The authorities did not release the identity of the child’s father, nor did they reveal more details about the condition of the women, saying that they were concerned with their emotional well-being. Angel Cordero, one of two men who helped Ms. Berry escape by kicking in the door, said that she appeared ragged — her clothes dirty, her teeth yellowed and her hair “messy” — and that the child with her looked “very nervous,” as though she had never seen anything outside the house before.
Ms. Berry, who is now 27, was last seen leaving her job at a Cleveland Burger King in April 2003. Almost exactly a year later, Ms. Dejesus, now 23, disappeared as she was walking home from school. The police said on Tuesday that Ms. Knight had not been seen since August 22, 2002, and that a missing persons’ report was made by a family member the next day. Mr. Cordero said he held the child while Ms. Berry called 911, frantically telling the dispatcher: “I’m Amanda Berry. I’ve been in the news for the last 10 years.”
The police said they were executing a search warrant at the house, at 2207 Seymour Ave. At a news conference on Tuesday, the authorities pleaded that the three women, now in their 20s and early 30s, be given space to recover from their ordeal.
The authorities said they discovered the previous calls to the house after they combed through their databases following the discovery of the women. Martin Flask, the director of public safety in Cleveland, said there was no indication of criminal intent by Mr. Castro in relation to the school bus incident, and as far as the authorities could determine, there was no record any of the neighbors, bystanders or other witnesses or anyone else had ever called about the women in relation to the house where they were eventually found. Meanwhile, neighborhood residents spent the day shaking their heads in disbelief over what the police said took place inside the house. Public records show that the property was in foreclosure, and the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, Timothy J. McGinty, described it as in very bad shape.
The women appeared to be physically unharmed, the authorities said shortly after they were discovered. But neighbors said that Ariel Castro appeared to be “a regular Joe,” who chatted with families on their porches, waved hello in the street and invited neighbors to clubs where he played bass with several Latin bands.
On Tuesday, they were released from MetroHealth hospital, where they had been taken to the emergency room and described as in “fair condition,” the hospital said. It said they were reunited with their families. “He was not a troublemaker,” said Jovita Marti, 58, whose mother lives across the street from the house on Seymour Avenue.
“The nightmare is over,” Stephen D. Anthony, special agent in charge of the Cleveland division of the F.B.I., said. But Zaida Delgado, 58, a family friend, said that Ariel Castro also had a darker side.
On Monday, television images showed neighbors lining the streets, applauding as emergency vehicles whisked the women away. “There was something not right about him,” she said. “He could be flakey and off the wall. He was also arrogant, like ‘I am Mr. Cool, I am the best.’ He had an attitude, like I am God’s gift.”
Mike Iwais, 35, a grocery store owner who lives near the house where the women were found, said he would see Mr. Castro strolling around the neighborhood, in nightclubs or restaurants. Mr. Iwais, who has lived in the neighborhood for 35 years and like Mr. Castro went to Lincoln West High School, said Mr. Castro played in a Latin music band at a club called Belinda’s. Some residents expressed anger at the police, who they said had not done enough to find the missing women.
“But I never saw anybody going in or out of his house except him. Not even one person,” Mr. Iwais said. " We all thought he lived alone because he was always by himself going in and out of the house. Sometimes he would sit on his porch and drink beer.” “The Cleveland police should be ashamed of themselves,” said Yolanda Asia, an assistant manager of a store that rents furniture and appliances. “These girls were five minutes away. They were looking for years and years, they were right under their nose.”
“He would have beers with people, other guys in the neighborhood, in their yards or on their porches, but he would never invite anyone over,” Mr. Iwais said. “And sometimes, you would say hello to him and he would not acknowledge you. It was strange.” In fact, one of the woman may have been a close friend of Ariel Castro’s daughter, Arlene. Ms. Castro appeared on the Fox program “America’s Most Wanted” in 2005 to talk about her “best friend,” Gina DeJesus. Ms. Castro was identified on the program as the last person to have seen Ms. DeJesus before she disappeared, and she recounted on the program how they had been walking home from school together that day.

Trip Gabriel reported from Cleveland, and Christine Hauser from New York. Serge F. Kovaleski and Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from New York.

Ariel Castro had worked as a school bus driver but had a history of disciplinary problems. In 2004, he was interviewed by the police after “inadvertently” leaving a child on the bus. In 2009, he was called before a disciplinary hearing for negligence and disregard for the safety of passengers. His employment was terminated in November 2012, after another “demonstration of lack of judgment,” according to school district records.
Israel Lugo, who lives three doors down from the Castro house, said Mr. Castro would often park the school bus outside the house between the morning and afternoon routes.
“He’ll go in the house, jump on his motorcycle, take off, come back, jump in the car, take off. Every time he switched a car, he switched an outfit,” he said.
Julian Cesar Castro, an uncle of the three brothers who owns the Caribe Grocery on the corner of Seymour and West 25th Street, said he and his brother Julio, Ariel’s father, migrated from Puerto Rico.
Julio died in 2004, Julian Castro said. Ariel had a wife, Angie, and children, but the marriage ended.
In recent years Ariel had grown more withdrawn, his uncle said. “It could have been because of the hiding personality. He had to have two personalities,” he said.
Despite the three young women’s ordeal during a decade of captivity, their discovery was an uplifting moment for relatives, friends and the city.
At Ms. DeJesus’s parents’ home bundles of balloons were tied to the front fence on Tuesday along with a banner that read, “Welcome Home Gina.”
Her cousin Cecily Cruz, 26, said she heard about Gina’s rescue Monday from a customer while she was working as a local gas station attendant. She called Gina’s family immediately and said she could hear Gina’s father in the background shouting: “She’s alive! They got my baby!”
Martin Flask, Cleveland’s director of public safety, said the endings of most missing persons cases were “usually tragic.” In this case, he said: “All of us are excited and pleased with the outcome. But when you look at what we suspect they experienced, our joy is tempered.”

Trip Gabriel reported from Cleveland, and Serge F. Kovaleski and Erica Goode from New York. Reporting was contributed by Steven Yaccino from Cleveland, Emma G. Fitzsimmons from New York, and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington. Research was contributed by Jack Begg and Sheelagh McNeill.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 7, 2013Correction: May 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying photo caption misspelled the given name of one of the suspects arrested in the case. He is Onil Castro, not Oneil.

An earlier version of this article and an accompanying photo caption misspelled the given name of one of the suspects arrested in the case. He is Onil Castro, not Oneil.