Read Online Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland by Amanda Berry - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Amanda Berry
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steep road with one hand, then stopping to fetch water from a communal well. He didn’t let anything stop him from going about his business.
Aurea Rodriguez Torres, Pepe’s niece, said that Nona and Pepe eventually became friendly again, though there were plenty of bad feelings in the village about Nona’s having abandoned Lillian and their four kids.
Nona, like so many other men who had been working on farms, soon left for higher wages on the mainland. In Cleveland he quickly earned enough money to send for Gladys, who now had two children with him.
When Ariel was around four, Lillian also went north, moving to Reading, Pennsylvania, where some of her relatives had settled. She left Ariel and his siblings with her mother in Puerto Rico and got a job operating a sewing machine in a factory. She sent money and presents home and when Ariel was about six, she returned to Yauco, gathered her children, and brought them all to Reading.
But during the year or two that Ariel was living with his grandmother, he said something horrible happened.
• • •
When he was about five years old, he said he was sexually abused by a boy, about nine or ten years old, who lived nearby. He said the abuse continued for about a year, but he never reported it to anyone.
Castro would later give the same account to FBI agents and court-appointed psychiatrists examining him to determine if he was mentally competent to stand trial.
“It’s known that people who are abused keep quiet, so I did,” he told the psychiatrists.
Because the abuse is alleged to have taken place nearly fifty years ago, it is difficult to verify, but near the end of his life Castro talked about it frequently. Law enforcement officials believe Castro might have fabricated the story as a way to defend his own behavior, possibly in the hope that a judge would be more lenient with him.
Castro also repeated the allegations in a four-page handwritten letter that police found in his kitchen on the day after his arrest. In that document, he identified his alleged abuser by his first name and the first names of his parents.
In La Parra, relatives and friends recognized those names immediately. They said the alleged abuser, now about sixty, was a neighbor of Castro’s when they were boys and he still lived in the area. When contacted by phone in the summer of 2014, the man was at first cordial and friendly, but when he heard the name “Ariel Castro,” he became angry and hung up.
• • •
Castro was twelve, in the spring of 1973, when Lillian moved the family from Reading to Cleveland. She later told police that even though she and Nona had split up, she wanted the kids to be closer to their father.
Castro had virtually no relationship with his father as a young boy, and he often described his relationship with his mother as terrible. In the letter found by police, he complained of being “abandoned by my father and later my mother.”
“My mother was an abusive parent,” he wrote. “Her ways of discipline were very bad. For this made me grow hatred for her. There were times I wished she would die.”
He told the court psychiatrists that his mother constantly hit him with “belts, sticks, and an open hand,” sometimes causing bruises. He said she was always “yelling negative things and cursing at us,” and “I would ask God for her to die.”
But in one of the many contradictory statements he made, Castro also told the psychiatrists that his mother had done “a good job” raising him. In fact, as an adult, he spent a great deal of time with her. She lived only a few blocks from Seymour Avenue, and he would visit her often, helping her with chores and eating dinner with her. When police reviewed his cell phone records after his arrest, it included a long list of calls to her.
Lillian Rodriguez, a small woman with white hair, visited him frequently when he was in jail awaiting sentencing. She has stayed largely out of the public eye since
Aurea Rodriguez Torres, Pepe’s niece, said that Nona and Pepe eventually became friendly again, though there were plenty of bad feelings in the village about Nona’s having abandoned Lillian and their four kids.
Nona, like so many other men who had been working on farms, soon left for higher wages on the mainland. In Cleveland he quickly earned enough money to send for Gladys, who now had two children with him.
When Ariel was around four, Lillian also went north, moving to Reading, Pennsylvania, where some of her relatives had settled. She left Ariel and his siblings with her mother in Puerto Rico and got a job operating a sewing machine in a factory. She sent money and presents home and when Ariel was about six, she returned to Yauco, gathered her children, and brought them all to Reading.
But during the year or two that Ariel was living with his grandmother, he said something horrible happened.
• • •
When he was about five years old, he said he was sexually abused by a boy, about nine or ten years old, who lived nearby. He said the abuse continued for about a year, but he never reported it to anyone.
Castro would later give the same account to FBI agents and court-appointed psychiatrists examining him to determine if he was mentally competent to stand trial.
“It’s known that people who are abused keep quiet, so I did,” he told the psychiatrists.
Because the abuse is alleged to have taken place nearly fifty years ago, it is difficult to verify, but near the end of his life Castro talked about it frequently. Law enforcement officials believe Castro might have fabricated the story as a way to defend his own behavior, possibly in the hope that a judge would be more lenient with him.
Castro also repeated the allegations in a four-page handwritten letter that police found in his kitchen on the day after his arrest. In that document, he identified his alleged abuser by his first name and the first names of his parents.
In La Parra, relatives and friends recognized those names immediately. They said the alleged abuser, now about sixty, was a neighbor of Castro’s when they were boys and he still lived in the area. When contacted by phone in the summer of 2014, the man was at first cordial and friendly, but when he heard the name “Ariel Castro,” he became angry and hung up.
• • •
Castro was twelve, in the spring of 1973, when Lillian moved the family from Reading to Cleveland. She later told police that even though she and Nona had split up, she wanted the kids to be closer to their father.
Castro had virtually no relationship with his father as a young boy, and he often described his relationship with his mother as terrible. In the letter found by police, he complained of being “abandoned by my father and later my mother.”
“My mother was an abusive parent,” he wrote. “Her ways of discipline were very bad. For this made me grow hatred for her. There were times I wished she would die.”
He told the court psychiatrists that his mother constantly hit him with “belts, sticks, and an open hand,” sometimes causing bruises. He said she was always “yelling negative things and cursing at us,” and “I would ask God for her to die.”
But in one of the many contradictory statements he made, Castro also told the psychiatrists that his mother had done “a good job” raising him. In fact, as an adult, he spent a great deal of time with her. She lived only a few blocks from Seymour Avenue, and he would visit her often, helping her with chores and eating dinner with her. When police reviewed his cell phone records after his arrest, it included a long list of calls to her.
Lillian Rodriguez, a small woman with white hair, visited him frequently when he was in jail awaiting sentencing. She has stayed largely out of the public eye since
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