Finding Me (28 page)

I left the hospital on May 10, 2013—four days after we escaped. I slipped out of there quietly, mostly because I wasn’t ready to talk to the media or anyone else. It was too frightening. A driver took me to my new home at the assisted living facility. We drove for at least an hour. As I stared out the window at the city, I was shocked at how much had changed. There were tall buildings I had never seen before. The downtown area had new houses and apartment buildings. Even the city buses looked different; the drivers now sat behind plastic barriers. I sat in the backseat and stared out at the unfamiliar surroundings. For eleven years my life had stood still, but Cleveland and the rest of the world had moved on. All I could do was weep.

26
______________

Starting Over

T
HE
ASSISTED
LIVING
FACILITY
was a two-story house run by a couple. They lived in their own separate area upstairs. Downstairs there were three double rooms, each shared by two people. There were seven or eight people altogether. Thank God I had my own room. And after eleven years locked away on a top floor, at last I got to live on the main floor. One resident was seventy, another was eighty-five, and there was even a ninety-five-year-old. A few months later an eighteen-year-old came, which gave me someone closer to my age to talk to.

But when you’ve spent eleven years in prison the last thing you’re looking for is “assistance” in a group home. What you want is freedom. You want to take control of every little decision that someone else has been dictating—like cooking your own food. I didn’t care for the meals they made (mostly Polish food), but there wasn’t much I could do about that. And when I first got there the people who ran the place kept trying to clean up for me. I know they were just trying to be helpful, but I really wanted to do it all myself.

Don’t get me wrong: I was thrilled and grateful to be safely away from that maniac. Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up and realize that no one is going to rape you that day? How wonderful it is to see the sunlight pouring through your window? How great it is to just walk around without a heavy chain on your wrist or ankle? It feels amazing. And once you have that feeling, you want your full independence. In other words, you want your whole life back.

A couple of days after I got to the house I finally watched some television. OH. MY. GOD. I knew our escape was a big deal—my lawyer had filled me in on some parts of the story—but until I saw the news I didn’t realize that the entire
world
was talking about it. I heard that Amanda told police that she realized the dude was gone when she came downstairs; she noticed he had left the inner front door unlocked. The storm door had a chain on it, so it would only open a little. But that crack was big enough for her to stick her arm through it. One reporter said that Amanda started screaming for help and waving. I never heard those screams up in my bedroom, so I wondered if she had been yelling while Gina and I were sitting in the room listening to the radio.

A black guy in the neighborhood, Charles Ramsey, told the cops that he heard the screaming while he was sitting at home, eating some McDonald’s. “I come outside,” he said in one interview, “and I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of a house. So I got on the porch, and she says, ‘Help me, I’ve been here a long time.’ I figured it was a domestic violence dispute.”

He and another neighbor, a Spanish guy named Angel Cadero, kicked out the bottom of the storm door. That must have been the pounding Gina and I heard when we thought someone was trying to rob us. Both Charles and Angel as well as the police and rescue people, the doctors and nurses, and everyone else who helped us out that day will always be my heroes.

Here’s what else I heard on the news: after Amanda crawled out of the bottom of the front door, she held onto Jocelyn real tight and ran across the street to a neighbor’s house. From there she called 911. Just about every news station in Cleveland was replaying the 911 call. This is part of the transcript from that call:

AMANDA
: Help me. I’m Amanda Berry.

OPERATOR
: You need police, fire, ambulance?

AMANDA
: I need police.

OPERATOR
: Okay, and what’s going on there?

AMANDA
: I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years, and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now.

OPERATOR
: Okay, and what’s your address?

AMANDA
: 2207 Seymour Avenue.

OPERATOR
: 2207 Seymour. Looks like you’re calling me from 2210.

AMANDA
: I’m across the street. I’m using the phone.

OPERATOR
: Okay, stay there with those neighbors. Talk to police when they get there.

When the cops got to the dude’s house Amanda told them Gina and I were still stuck inside. According to a couple of reports I heard, she also told them they could probably find the dude in the neighborhood, driving a blue Mazda Miata convertible. I had never seen that car, but he used it when he drove Jocelyn around.

I will probably never know every detail of what happened on the day of our escape, because I was in my room until the police came upstairs. And I didn’t really get to talk to Amanda much after we rode in the back of the ambulance on May 6. Months later I saw her for a couple of minutes when the three of us videotaped a statement for the press. But there were so many people around us that we couldn’t really sit down and talk.

From what my lawyer told me, the police found Ariel Castro in a McDonald’s parking lot, sitting in his Mazda with one of his brothers, Onil. The police arrested them, and, later, another brother, Pedro. The brothers were let go three days later on May 9 because the police said they didn’t have anything to do with our kidnappings. Both of them said they had visited the house on Seymour but that the dude kept them in the kitchen area. They said he was always very secretive, and he kept padlocks on a lot of his doors. They also said they had no clue we were in the house and if they had known, they definitely would have called the cops.

The behavior his brothers described matches what I knew about the dude. No one was more sneaky or manipulative than that monster. His own son, Anthony, said he had no idea what his father had done. He told the press that just a couple of weeks before our escape his father had asked him if he thought Amanda Berry was still alive. When Anthony told his dad that he thought Amanda was gone, the dude said, “Really? You think so?” Anthony thought that was weird at the time, but he had no idea his father actually had Amanda in captivity.

In hindsight I think maybe the dude
wanted
to get caught. His whole world was crumbling; he had lost his job. I could tell he was fed up with his life. Toward the end he would say things like, “One day they’re going to find out what I did and lock me away.” He knew he wasn’t going to be able to keep up his lie for much longer, with Jocelyn getting older. That’s probably why he mentioned Amanda to his son. Somewhere inside of him maybe he wanted someone to catch him so the insanity could just be over.

Over the summer of 2013 I followed the news stories. The police charged the dude with four counts of kidnapping and three counts of rape. I thought,
Is that it? Just three?
But on July 26 he pled guilty to 937 crimes, including rape, assault, and murder.
That sounds more like it
, I thought.

As part of that deal he would get life in prison without the chance for parole—and his disgusting house would be destroyed. Some of what he said in court made me furious. He talked about his porn addiction and how he was abused when he was a kid. I had heard it all before. Plenty of people get abused, but they don’t go out and kidnap three women. I didn’t feel sorry for him; I was still angry.

B
EFORE
THE
DUDE
’
S
sentencing hearing on August 1, I had decided I wanted to testify. My lawyers didn’t think that was a good idea. I think they wanted to protect me from seeing him again.

“I need to face my demon,” I told them. “I want to speak in court. I don’t have a problem with doing that.”

Several weeks before the hearing Gina and I talked on the phone. “Are you going to testify?” I asked her.

She sighed. “I don’t think I’m ready,” she told me. “Are you?”

“Heck yeah,” I told her. “I don’t want to look back later on and wish that I had done it.”

Gina did not testify, and for her that was the right choice. Her cousin, Sylvia Colon, gave a comment on behalf of her and her family. My lawyer told me that Amanda wasn’t planning to go to court either; her sister, Beth Serrano, would speak for her instead. Each one of us had to pick our own path. I chose to write out a statement and speak, mostly because it felt like a way for me to start healing. Every day in that house that man did the most horrible things to me. I wanted to prove to him and to the world that he might have hurt me very badly, but he hadn’t broken me. In the end I was still here. Still standing strong.

On the day of the sentencing I didn’t think too much about what I would wear. I just threw on a flowered dress I had. I wasn’t focused on what anybody else thought of me or how I would sound. I walked into the courtroom and took my seat next to my lawyers. When I first saw the dude it felt a little creepy. The whole time he sat at a table wearing handcuffs, he kept staring at me. It was like his eyes were saying, “Please tell them I didn’t do anything wrong.”

I felt disgusted. He looked skinnier than he had in the house. I guess he didn’t like the food they were giving him in jail.
Now you know how I felt
, I thought. He was a little bit cleaned up, but he was still as ugly as ever. Especially in that orange jumpsuit.

The family members of Gina and Amanda spoke before I did. When I finally got up to read my statement, my hands were trembling, as usual. But other than that, I felt pretty calm:

Good afternoon. My name is Michelle Knight. And I would like to tell you what this was like for me. I missed my son every day. I wondered if I was ever going to see him again. He was only two and a half years old when I was taken. I look inside my heart and I see my son. I cried every night. I was so alone. I worried about what would happen to me and the other girls every day. Days never got shorter. Days turned into nights. Nights turned into days. The years turned into eternity.

I knew nobody cared about me. He told me that my family didn’t care even on holidays. Christmas was the most traumatic day because I never got to spend it with my son. Nobody should ever have to go through what I went through, or anybody else, not even the worst enemy.

Gina was my teammate. She never let me fall. I never let her fall. She nursed me back to health when I was dying from his abuse. My friendship with her is the only thing that was good out of this situation. We said we would someday make it out alive, and we did.

Ariel Castro, I remember all the times that you came home talking about what everybody else did wrong and act like you wasn’t doing the same thing. You said, at least I didn’t kill you. But you took eleven years of my life away, and I have got it back. I spent eleven years in hell, and now your hell is just beginning.

I will overcome all this that happened, but you will face hell for eternity. From this moment on, I will not let you define me or affect who I am. I will live on. You will die a little every day.

As you think about the eleven years and atrocities you inflicted on us, what does God think of you hypocritically going to church every Sunday, coming home to torture us? The death penalty would be so much easier. You don’t deserve that. You deserve to spend life in prison. I can forgive you, but I will never forget. With the guidance of God, I will prevail and help others that suffered at the hands of others.

Writing this statement gave me the strength to be a stronger woman, and know that there’s good. There is more good than evil. I know that there are a lot of people going through hard times, but we need to reach out a hand and hold them and let them know that they’re being heard. After eleven years, I am finally being heard, and it’s liberating. Thank you all. I love you. God bless you.

After I got done reading, I felt so free, but it was a different kind of freedom from the kind I got on May 6. Getting out of the house was liberty for my body; showing up in court was freedom for my emotions and spirit. When I sat back down my lawyer and a few other people hugged me, and I cried. I didn’t cry because I was sad. Those were tears of happiness and relief.