Three women reunited with families after years in captivity - CNN International

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  • NEW: A neighbor called police to the house in 2011, but no one answered
  • NEW: Such discoveries are more common, a missing persons expert says
  • Three suspects, all brothers, are arrested and awaiting charges, police say
  • The women disappeared in separate incidents almost a decade ago


Editor's note: For more on this story, check out coverage on CNN affiliates WJW, WEWS, WKYC and WOIO
(CNN) -- [Breaking news update at 9:40 a.m. Tuesday]
Officials have no indication that anybody living near the Cleveland home where three women were believed to have been held captive for years ever called authorities about anything suspicious there, city Public Safety Director Martin Flask said. Flask said that assessment is based on an initial review of city databases; officials will continue to examine the databases, he said.
[Original story, posted at 9:26 a.m. Tuesday]
911 call -- 'I've been kidnapped!' -- cops find 3 women missing for years
(CNN) -- Amanda Berry was last seen after finishing her shift at a Burger King in Cleveland in 2003. It was the eve of her 17th birthday.
Georgina "Gina" DeJesus disappeared nearly a year later, in April 2004. She was 14.
Michele Knight vanished in 2002, at age 19, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper.
But all three were found alive in a home in a Cleveland neighborhood Monday night, police announced in a development hailed as a miracle by their families.
"Help me, I am Amanda Berry," the young woman told police in a frantic 911 call from a neighbor's house. "I've been kidnapped, and I've been missing for 10 years. And I'm here, I'm free now."
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Amanda Berry vanished a few blocks from her Cleveland, Ohio, home on April 21, 2003. She was 16. On Monday, May 6, she was found with two other missing women blocks from where she disappeared. Click through to see more miraculous stories of lost children were found months or even years later.

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Georgiana "Gina" DeJesus was found on May 6 with Amanda Berry and Michele Knight in Cleveland. DeJesus was last seen in Cleveland on April 2, 2004, on her way home from school. She was 14 when she went missing.

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On June 5, 2002, when Elizabeth Smart was 14, she was abducted from her bed, raped and held captive for nine months by Brian David Mitchell. On May 25, 2011, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison.

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Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian woman, was held prisoner in a basement for eight years from the time she was 10. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, beat her up to 200 times a week, manacled her to him as they slept and forced her to walk around half-naked as a domestic slave after kidnapping her in 1998. Kampusch escaped in August 2006. Priklopil committed suicide shortly thereafter.

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Eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted in 1991 from outside her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was held by Phillip and Nancy Garrido in a hidden compound of sheds along with the two daughters to whom she subsequently gave birth. Dugard and her daughters were found in 2009.

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Shawn Damian Hornbeck spent more than four years with Michael Devlin, passing as his captor's son in Kirkwood, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb. Shawn was 15 when he was found in 2007 and reunited with his family.



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Missing children who were found


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3 missing women found alive in Ohio
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Suspects' uncle: I never want to see them
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Neighbor kicked in door to rescue women
Police swiftly moved in on the house where the three women said they had been held and later arrested a 52-year-old man, identified as a former school bus driver. Two others, identified as his brothers, ages 50 and 54, also have been arrested, Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba told reporters late Monday. Police believe only the middle brother lived at the home, he said.
The men are being held in the city jail awaiting charges. An FBI team is collecting evidence in the house.
"This is a great, great outcome that we have them still with us," Tomba said. "It's just truly, truly amazing and it's a blessing to the community and to the members of the police department and their families that they're alive. I can't tell you how happy we are."
Those feelings were echoed at Cleveland's Metro Health Medical Center where the three women and a fourth person were treated before being released Tuesday morning.
"This isn't the ending we usually hear to these stories, so we're very happy," said Dr. Gerald Maloney, an emergency room physician there. "We're very happy for them."
A fourth person had been treated at the hospital. Maloney would not identify that person, but witnesses said Berry, who escaped from the house with the help of a neighbor, had a young child with her.
Survival the key difference from 'House of Horrors' case
The escape
Neighbor Charles Ramsey was sitting down to a fast food meal Monday night when he heard screaming.
"I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of a house," he told CNN affiliate WEWS. "I go on the porch and she says, 'help me get out. I've been in here a long time.'"
Figuring it was a domestic dispute, Ramsey kicked in the bottom of the door and the woman came out with a little girl and said, "Call 911, my name is Amanda Berry," according to Ramsey, who admitted he didn't recognize the name or know she was missing.
Free from the house where they had been held captive, Berry pleaded for a phone.
"They were crazy, screaming, 'Help, call police, please help.' ... They were desperate, crying, running," said Angela Garcia, whose aunt provided the phone for them to call police.
Ramsey also called 911, less than a minute later.
"She's like, 'This (expletive) kidnapped me and my daughter,'" he told 911.
DeJesus's mother, Nancy, met with her at the hospital, cousin Sylvia Colon told CNN's "Piers Morgan Live." She had never given up hope of finding her daughter alive.
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Crowd cheers for Amanda Berry
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Kidnapping suspect's son 'truly stunned'
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Amanda Berry's aunt didn't give up hope
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John Walsh's advice to abduction victims
"She has always said that she just could feel it, a link a mom can feel, but she always believed Gina was alive and well," Colon said. "She always believed that. I just want to say what a phenomenal Mother's Day gift she gets this Mother's Day."
Suspect's identity
Read CNN story on three missing from 2009
Brian Cummins, a councilman who represents the area where the women were found, identified the suspect as Ariel Castro.
The Plain Dealer reported that Castro was arrested at a nearby McDonald's.
His uncle, Julio Castro, told CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" that his family had grown up in the same west Cleveland neighborhood and knew the DeJesus family.
Castro used to work as a bus driver for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, according to district spokeswoman Roseann Canfora. She did not have specifics Monday night on how long he was employed, when he left or whether he was fired or left voluntarily.
Ramsey told reporters the suspect wasn't known for anything exciting -- "until today."
"We see this dude every day. I've been here a year. I barbecued with this dude. We eat ribs and listen to salsa music," Ramsey said.
"We never saw the girls there, and we were always outside," she said. "We only saw the guy."
Neighbor Israel Lugo said his sister got a bad vibe from the house and asked him not to let the children play unsupervised nearby. He said he heard yelling in the house in November 2011 and called police to investigate, but they left after no one answered the door.
He said he saw Castro at the park Sunday with a little girl and asked who it was.
"He said it was his girlfriend's daughter," Lugo told CNN.
Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson said there were "many unanswered questions regarding this case, and the investigation will be ongoing." But he added, "I am thankful that these three young ladies are found and alive."
Other cases
While amazing, such discoveries are more common now, said John D. Ryan, CEO of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
"To us at the National Center, this is not something that we find shocking any more," he said. "The fact is, we have seen more and more long term missing cases end up in the victim being rescued many years after their original abduction."
The most widely reported such incident in recent years was that of Jaycee Dugard, who was freed in 2009 after 18 years of captivity behind the home of a California couple.
Last year, he said, a 43-year-old man was found and reunited with his mother after being abducted at the age of 2.
CNN's Steve Almasy, Laura Ly and CNN's Rande Iaboni contributed to this report.

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