Read Online Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Amanda Berry
Ads: Link
called the police when she came home and heard her son’s account.
When police did not find Castro at his home that evening, they got back in their patrol car and left, referring the case to detectives for follow-up.
Amanda was chained in a bedroom on the second floor, but she never heard anyone knocking. Castro, as usual, had left the radio blaring in the hall.
A month later, Castro was finally interviewed about the incident at the police station. He did not deny leaving the boy on the bus, but said it was an accident, an oversight. He said he only realized the boy was still there when he returned to the bus headquarters, and he insisted that he had never cursed at him.
He said he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t followed standard procedure and checked the bus at the end of his route.
“I was still mourning my father’s death, and I wasn’t quite right at that point in time,” he told police, noting that his father had died two weeks earlier. “I am very sorry for forgetting the student on the bus.”
Police referred the case to prosecutors, who declined to seek criminal charges.
The school system suspended Castro for sixty days without pay.
Part Two
Ariel Castro was born in the lush green hills of rural Puerto Rico, and his journey to Seymour Avenue began with his father, Pedro Castro, who arrived in Cleveland in the mid-1960s with big dreams and a chopped-off hand.
The elder Castro, known as Nona, joined the post–World War II flood of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. He came from Yauco, a town in the southwestern mountains, where coffee and bananas were plentiful but jobs and money were not. In the 1950s and ’60s, Cleveland’s steel mills, railroad yards, and manufacturing plants were drawing people from struggling Appalachian hamlets as well as eager immigrants from Ireland, Hungary, other European countries, and Puerto Rico.
Nona followed his brothers to Cleveland, where the Castro family was establishing itself as a well-regarded clan of small businessmen in the city’s near west side, just across the Cuyahoga River from downtown. Nona’s older brother, Julio Cesar “Cesi” Castro, had opened the Caribe Grocery, a bodega that sold Caribbean food and became a social and political hub for the growing Puerto Rican community. His brother Edwin started Isla Music, which featured Latin music and quickly became a local landmark. Another brother ran a hardware store.
Nona opened a used car lot on West 25th Street and was an unforgettable salesman, with a prosthetic left hand that he would put on and take off. He often told people that his hand had been mangled when someone accidentally slammed it in a car door. But the real story eventually made its way around Cleveland: He had lost the hand in Puerto Rico in a fight over a woman.
• • •
The man who had sliced off Castro’s hand at the wrist, and left him with scars on his back and head, was named Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez, a neighbor of Castro’s in La Parra, a tiny cluster of cinder-block houses on a narrow mountain road on the outskirts of Yauco.
A half century later, relatives of both men, who have since died, aren’t certain of the exact cause of the machete fight, but they do remember that it had something to do with Nona’s complicated relations with women.
Nona began his first family with Lillian Rodriguez in a one-story house on top of a hill in La Parra. Starting in 1958, they had three children in three years. The third, Ariel, was born on July 10, 1960.
About a year later, when Lillian was pregnant with their fourth child, Nona left her and the children and took up with another woman, Gladys Torres, who lived farther down the country lane. Both women were pregnant with Nona’s children at the same time, in a village where just about everyone was related to one woman or the other.
It was around then that Nona lost his hand.
Monserrate Baez, Lillian’s sister-in-law, recalled the sight of Nona driving his Jeep up the
When police did not find Castro at his home that evening, they got back in their patrol car and left, referring the case to detectives for follow-up.
Amanda was chained in a bedroom on the second floor, but she never heard anyone knocking. Castro, as usual, had left the radio blaring in the hall.
A month later, Castro was finally interviewed about the incident at the police station. He did not deny leaving the boy on the bus, but said it was an accident, an oversight. He said he only realized the boy was still there when he returned to the bus headquarters, and he insisted that he had never cursed at him.
He said he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t followed standard procedure and checked the bus at the end of his route.
“I was still mourning my father’s death, and I wasn’t quite right at that point in time,” he told police, noting that his father had died two weeks earlier. “I am very sorry for forgetting the student on the bus.”
Police referred the case to prosecutors, who declined to seek criminal charges.
The school system suspended Castro for sixty days without pay.
Part Two
Ariel Castro was born in the lush green hills of rural Puerto Rico, and his journey to Seymour Avenue began with his father, Pedro Castro, who arrived in Cleveland in the mid-1960s with big dreams and a chopped-off hand.
The elder Castro, known as Nona, joined the post–World War II flood of Puerto Ricans to the U.S. mainland. He came from Yauco, a town in the southwestern mountains, where coffee and bananas were plentiful but jobs and money were not. In the 1950s and ’60s, Cleveland’s steel mills, railroad yards, and manufacturing plants were drawing people from struggling Appalachian hamlets as well as eager immigrants from Ireland, Hungary, other European countries, and Puerto Rico.
Nona followed his brothers to Cleveland, where the Castro family was establishing itself as a well-regarded clan of small businessmen in the city’s near west side, just across the Cuyahoga River from downtown. Nona’s older brother, Julio Cesar “Cesi” Castro, had opened the Caribe Grocery, a bodega that sold Caribbean food and became a social and political hub for the growing Puerto Rican community. His brother Edwin started Isla Music, which featured Latin music and quickly became a local landmark. Another brother ran a hardware store.
Nona opened a used car lot on West 25th Street and was an unforgettable salesman, with a prosthetic left hand that he would put on and take off. He often told people that his hand had been mangled when someone accidentally slammed it in a car door. But the real story eventually made its way around Cleveland: He had lost the hand in Puerto Rico in a fight over a woman.
• • •
The man who had sliced off Castro’s hand at the wrist, and left him with scars on his back and head, was named Jose “Pepe” Rodriguez, a neighbor of Castro’s in La Parra, a tiny cluster of cinder-block houses on a narrow mountain road on the outskirts of Yauco.
A half century later, relatives of both men, who have since died, aren’t certain of the exact cause of the machete fight, but they do remember that it had something to do with Nona’s complicated relations with women.
Nona began his first family with Lillian Rodriguez in a one-story house on top of a hill in La Parra. Starting in 1958, they had three children in three years. The third, Ariel, was born on July 10, 1960.
About a year later, when Lillian was pregnant with their fourth child, Nona left her and the children and took up with another woman, Gladys Torres, who lived farther down the country lane. Both women were pregnant with Nona’s children at the same time, in a village where just about everyone was related to one woman or the other.
It was around then that Nona lost his hand.
Monserrate Baez, Lillian’s sister-in-law, recalled the sight of Nona driving his Jeep up the
Similar Books
