The Lost Girls (18 page)

Castro kept her upstairs and stopped her from going into the kitchen, ordering Gina not to feed her.

“She’ll do it anyway,” said Michelle, “because she didn’t want me to hurt.”

Michelle vomited continually during this pregnancy, enduring three weeks of agonizing pain as she starved. Every night, as they lay chained together in bed, Gina would rub Michelle’s stomach to reassure her and try to ease the pain.

Finally, losing patience, Ariel Castro punched and kicked Michelle in the stomach, until she aborted their baby.

On Christmas Day, Amanda Berry went into labor and Ariel Castro brought her into the basement to give birth. As her contractions became stronger, Castro ordered Michelle, who was still recovering from losing her own baby, into the basement to deliver Amanda’s. In preparation he had bought a black plastic children’s swimming pool for Amanda to sit in, so there would be no mess.

Down in the filthy basement, Castro and Michelle were sitting on either side of Amanda as the baby started to emerge. Suddenly, Amanda pushed and the baby’s head became stuck. The baby began turning blue from lack of oxygen.

Michelle, who had no medical training, told her to stop pushing, as the baby could not breathe. But Amanda said she couldn’t help it.

“And I told her, ‘Oh, I see the baby’s head,’” said Michelle. “And the baby is blue.”

Michelle said they had to get the baby out right now, grabbing Amanda’s arms to support her.

“When I say, ‘One, two, three,’” Michelle told her, “I want you to push as hard as possible and grab onto my hands.”

Finally, as Amanda held Michelle’s hands, the baby came out but was not breathing. When Ariel Castro saw this he screamed at Michelle, telling her it was her fault and threatening to kill her if his baby died.

“So I laid the baby flat on her back,” said Michelle, “and lifted her head up.”

Michelle began breathing into the baby’s mouth and doing compressions with two fingers, as Castro kept threatening to kill her. Then the baby started screaming.

It was a baby girl and Ariel Castro named her Jocelyn, keeping the placenta in his refrigerator as a memento.

Soon after Jocelyn was born, Ariel Castro took off Amanda’s chains, so her baby would never have to see them. But it would be another two years before he would remove Gina and Michelle’s. The tiny baby moved into Amanda’s bedroom and she took care of it.

The new baby in the house raised everyone’s spirits. Ariel Castro now saw his three hostages and his new daughter as a family, although he didn’t hesitate to beat them at any opportunity.

After seeing four of her pregnancies brutally terminated, Michelle was delighted that something positive had finally come out of 2207 Seymour Avenue.

“It was just so amazing to bring a new life into the world,” she said, “but it was also traumatic at the same time. I knew that if I didn’t get her to breathe, that he would have killed me right then and there.”

Three months later, on April 4, 2007, nineteen-year-old Emily Castro repeatedly slashed her eleven-month-old baby’s throat with a knife. Emily had recently stopped taking her medicine for manic depression and become delusional. She believed that her boyfriend, DeAngelo Gonzalez, had slept with her two sisters and mother, who all planned to kill her and take her baby.

The previous day, Gonzalez had moved out of their apartment, leaving their baby, Janyla, behind. Emily had called her mother, who came over and hardly recognized her.

“Her eyes didn’t seem the same,” said Nilda. “She was not there.”

At around 6:30
P.M.
the next day, Emily picked up her infant daughter and carried her into the garage. She then slashed the baby’s throat four times with a sharp knife, before carrying her back into the house, covered in blood and struggling for breath. Nilda grabbed her granddaughter out of Emily’s arms and ran into the street, screaming for help.

After they left, Emily tried to commit suicide using the same knife she had tried to kill her baby with. She slashed her wrists and stabbed her neck, before staggering outside to a creek behind her home, where she tried to drown herself.

Meanwhile in the street, Nilda desperately flagged down a young student named Heather Powell, showing her the baby, who was bleeding from deep cuts to the throat.

“The bitch tried to kill the baby,” Nilda told Powell, who misunderstood, thinking Janyla had been bitten by a dog. She then called 911, reporting that a baby had been attacked by a dog.

As they were waiting for medics to arrive, a nurse who was passing by tried to stop the baby’s bleeding with a towel.

When Fort Wayne police arrived, they found Nilda Figueroa holding her granddaughter, who was covered in blood. A few minutes later, Emily gave herself up to police, drenched in blood, mud and water.

She was then arrested for attempted murder and battery, as she and her daughter were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment.

The next day, Emily Castro was interviewed in the hospital by Fort Wayne Police Detective Taya Strausborger. Wearing a hospital gown, her wrists heavily bandaged from her suicide attempt, Emily told the detective that she had been hearing voices and believed her boyfriend was cheating with her sisters and mother.

“It really spaced me out,” Emily told the detective. “They were going to kill me and take my daughter.”

In the ninety-minute videotaped interview, a tearful Emily said that if she was going to be murdered, she wanted to take her baby with her.

Later, Fernando Colon would say that he was not surprised what had happened to Emily, after Ariel Castro had cut him out of their lives.

“Everything went down the drain,” he said in 2013. “They started using drugs. They got pregnant. Everything that I tried to prevent happened right after Ariel made those accusations, because they didn’t have me there to stop it.”

On Saturday, April 22, Amanda Berry celebrated her twenty-first birthday, one day after the fourth anniversary of her abduction. At seven that night, her family organized a “Mandy’s Birthday Prayer Vigil,” outside the Burger King where she was last seen.

“Let’s stand in for Louwana and pray for Mandy’s safe return,” read the flier, with a photograph of Amanda and her late mother. It also invited supporters to choose a biblical passage and post it on Amanda’s newly inaugurated website at
www.amandaberry.net
.

The official flier for her vigil quoted Isiah 54:17, saying, “No weapons formed against (Amanda Berry) shall prosper!! The word becomes flesh. Wherever she is Jesus is! God is the word!!”

On July 9, fourteen-year-old Ashley Summers went missing. The pretty Cleveland teenager, who bore a striking resemblance to Amanda Berry, disappeared in the same West Side neighborhood as she and Gina DeJesus had.

Detectives investigating the case at the time believed it might be connected to Amanda and Gina’s disappearances.

That summer, Ariel Castro was highly visible on the Cleveland Latin music scene. Most weekends he played at clubs all over the city with his various bands.

“He wanted to be in the spotlight,” recalled Belinda’s Nightclub owner, William Perez. “He wanted to be
the
kid.”

Pianist Tito DeJesus, who often played with him, said Castro loved attention.

“Ariel would stand in the middle of the stage playing,” said Tito. “I mean, that’s a weird spot for a bass player. Often when he was playing he would go into a daze. We’d tell him to pay attention, but he would close his eyes and just drift off. We used to always make fun of him.”

Castro was now playing with Grupo Fuego, one of the top Latin bands in Cleveland. He was usually late for practices and gigs, offering such lame excuses that they ended up firing him.

He also played sporadically with Grupo Kanon over a fifteen-year period, at various clubs, churches and cultural events. Bandleader Ivan “Popo” Ruiz later described him as weird and crazy.

“He could do the job,” Ruiz told the
Plain Dealer
, “but he became increasingly defensive and unreliable. It was like he couldn’t leave the house.”

Ruiz, who owns a restaurant and is a pillar of Cleveland’s Latin music scene, thought it strange the bassist rarely allowed anyone into his house, to help carry out heavy amplifiers and musical equipment.

“He wouldn’t let me pull up the driveway,” recalled Ruiz. “Said there were nails or something.”

Ruiz also wondered why Castro never stayed overnight in hotel rooms with the other musicians when they played out of town.

“He would say, ‘I have to get home,’” recalled Ruiz. “He was the only one who never stayed. It was weird.”

After Jocelyn was born, Ariel Castro stopped going into his uncle Cesi’s Caribe bodega, as questions might have been raised if he bought diapers and baby food. Having a new baby in the house gave the three hostages hope that one day things would improve. Amanda was a natural mother and nurtured Jocelyn from the beginning, while her father was always careful to treat the girls better when the baby was around.

“It brought a joy into the house,” said Michelle Knight, “even though there was sadness. It was like having a beautiful light [and there were] smiles and laughter. It made [us] hope that there would be a brighter day.”

On Tuesday, January 15, 2008, Emily Castro went on trial for the attempted murder of her baby daughter. Waiving her right to a jury trial, Castro, who had been found competent, was pleading an insanity defense. She faced twenty to fifty years in prison if convicted.

Since the attack, Janyla had made a complete recovery and was living with her father, DeAngelo Gonzalez.

On the first day of the three-day trial, Allen County Deputy Prosecutor Stacey Speith briefly outlined the state’s case to Superior Court Judge John F. Surbeck, who would be deciding the outcome. She told the judge how Emily had tried to kill Janyla after her boyfriend broke up with her.

Then defense attorney Zachary Witte said that Emily had suffered from depression since she was thirteen, but she had become paranoid after her daughter’s birth. Witte told the judge that Emily’s maternal instincts had succumbed to her depression.

The prosecution then called student Heather Powell, who described dialing 911 after Nilda ran toward her in the street with her bleeding granddaughter. Emily Castro’s friend and neighbor Shamona Howard told the judge that she was “a caring and compassionate mother,” whom she never thought would harm her baby.

Fort Wayne police officer Christopher Reed then described how Emily Castro had walked up to him, after trying to commit suicide, soaking wet and covered in mud and blood.

On the second day of the trial, prosecutors reviewed Emily’s hospital interrogation. Still recovering from her wounds, with a blanket over her hospital gown, she said she heard voices. And she had believed her mother and two sisters were having an affair with Gonzalez, and wanted to kill her baby.

Watching the video from the defense bench, Emily wept throughout it.

Then Nilda Figueroa testified, telling the judge that her daughter was “paranoid.”

“She didn’t think straight,” Nilda said. “She would think things about people that wasn’t true.”

Nilda said her daughter seemed emotionally distant when she saw her the night before the attack.

“She was so withdrawn,” she said. “That was not my daughter that was there.”

Then Deputy Prosecutor Patricia Pikel asked Nilda why Emily had tried to kill Janyla.

“There’s no way my daughter [would] do that,” Nilda replied.

The prosecutor also asked why the Castro family had not had Emily committed to a psychiatric hospital earlier, if she had posed a danger to herself and other people.

Nilda said the family had been worried Emily would hurt herself, taking her to the Parkview Behavioral Health facility a few months before the incident.

On the final day of the trial, Judge Surbeck heard testimony from court-appointed psychologist David Lombard. He testified that Emily was sane, and had deliberately exaggerated symptoms of mental illness when he had examined her. He acknowledged she did suffer from manic-depressive disorder, but that would not affect her knowing the difference between right and wrong.

Several other Castro family members testified on Emily’s behalf, supporting her insanity defense.

In his summation, Judge Surbeck said that her family had “exaggerated or ignored what happened in the past to support their family member.”

He then convicted Emily Castro of attempting to murder her daughter, saying mental illness did not equal insanity.

“[Emily] exaggerated issues to create an insanity defense where none exists,” he said. “She does suffer from significant mental illness, but not such that it keeps her from knowing right from wrong.”

Then, as Emily wept at the defense table, the judge added that although it defied human nature that a mother would try to kill her baby, it did not mean she was insane.

“Frequently things don’t make sense,” he said. “And in no sphere of experience does this make sense.”

A month later, at her sentencing, Ariel Castro, Jr., read out a statement to the judge on her behalf.

“What happened to Janyla was serious, unthinkable and irreversible,” he said. “What happened to my sister is no less serious.”

He said the family had observed Emily’s mental illness every day, and it was regrettable that it did not meet the legal definition of insanity. He described Emily as a “proud mother,” who had started a scrapbook in preparation for Janyla’s first birthday.

“[She is not an] animal who tried to kill her daughter out of revenge,” he told the judge.

Then Emily Castro stood up to address Judge Surbeck before he passed sentence.

“I don’t know how this happened,” she sobbed. “I want you to know I am a very good mom.”

The judge then sentenced her to thirty years in prison, suspending the last five years to be served as probation. She was also ordered to seek mental health treatment as part of her probation.

“It’s certainly a mystery,” said the judge, “as to how this happened or why this happened.”