Ohio Women Missing For A Decade Found Alive
UPDATE 10:15 p.m.: Audio of Berry's 911 call has been posted online by the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper. Here are the pertinent bits:
"Help me, I'm Amanda Berry. I need police. I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years and I'm here, I'm free now," she can be heard pleading. "Are they on their way right now? I need them now. No, I need them now before he gets back. I mean like right now. His name is Ariel Castro, he's like 52. I'm Amanda Berry, I've been on the news for like 10 years, with Gina."
The recording makes it clear that Berry is aware of how famous her case has been over the decade since she went missing.
"He's not here right now. That's how I got away," she adds toward the end of the call.
UPDATE 10:03 p.m.: Dr. Gerald Maloney, of the emergency department at Cleveland's MetroHealth Medical Center, just briefed the press about the women's condition. The three are being tended to by medical professionals at the center, Maloney said.
"Currently they're safe. We're in the process of evaluating their medical needs," he told the gathered press. "They appear to be in fair condition at the moment. I can't go into any further specific details."
A representative of the hospital said the Cleveland Police Department will provide more information at a briefing scheduled for 9:30 Tuesday morning.
"This is really good because this isn’t the ending we usually hear to these stories, so we’re very happy," Maloney added later. "They are able to speak with us. Beyond that I can't really go into any further details."
This story is being updated as more details emerge.
Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus were just teenagers went they went missing in Ohio, in 2003 and 2004 respectively, and now that the pair have been found alive, the just-passed tenth anniversary of Berry's disappearance is an occasion for joy.
Berry was one day from her 17th birthday on April 21, 2003, when she was last heard from. She called her sister and said she would be getting a ride home from her after-school job at a Cleveland-area Burger King. And DeJesus was 14 when she was last heard from before going missing while walking home from school.
The girls were found at a home in the same area where Berry was last seen 10 years ago, and the Cleveland's Fox 8 TV station reports that a 52-year-old man has been taken into custody.
On Monday, the two women and a third woman named Michele Knight, were found very much alive in a residential district south of downtown Cleveland, according to Fox8.
The girls' disappearance captured the nation's focus when in it took place, but even Berry's mother Louwana Miller said less than two years after the disappearance that she had almost lost hope that her daughter would be found alive, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.
It appears that a psychic who told Miller her daughter was dead was actually wrong in the end, and that though the women have likely been through quite the ordeal, they have finally been found alive.
The revelation that Berry and DeJesus had been found comes just four months after prison inmate Robert Wolford was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison after he admitted he falsely reported that he knew where Berry's body was buried. The false information led authorities to take Wolford to a lot in Cleveland which was excavated in a fruitless search for Berry's remains, the AP reported. In September 2006, police dug under a garage floor while acting on an erroneous tip suggesting that DeJesus' body was buried there.
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