“So, you know, I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute,” Charles Ramsey told a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Cleveland, explaining what happened after, as he put it, he “heard screaming. I’m eating McDonald’s. I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of the house.” Ramsey, and others who gathered, helped her break open the door, kicking it from the bottom. She told them her name, Amanda Berry. She had been kidnapped at the age of seventeen, ten years ago. There were two other women in the house, Gina DeJesus, who is now twenty-three, and Michelle Knight, now thirty, who had also been held for a decade. There was at least one small child.
Ramsey’s 911 call is transfixing. “Yeah hey bro,” it begins, “hey, check this out.” His intensity, the McDonald’s shout-out, his undoubtedly loose paraphrase of Berry’s account (“This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter”), and also his competence (he does a better job with the essentials like the address than the 911 operator) make him one of those instantly compelling figures who, in the middle of an American tragedy, just start talking—and then we can’t stop listening. (See Ruslan Tsarni, Ashley Smith.) But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.
Three men are now being held—reportedly Ariel Castro, a bus driver who owned the house, and his two brothers, all in their early fifties. The three women were examined at a hospital, and there are already pictures of reunions with their families; the Plain Dealer reported that “drivers passing the hospital and the neighborhood honked their car horns in support.” Most people thought they were dead; the big tips in their cases, in the last few years, had been about where the bodies might have been dumped. The police chief talked about the emotion on the faces of officers who’d been looking for them for years.
During the call, the operator asks Ramsey if Berry needs an ambulance. He replies.
Put yourself in her shoes. Berry and the others will need everything—they have lost so much of their lives, and will now have what’s left exposed and questioned. But Berry didn’t give up, and, in the end, she got them out of there. According to a police conference on Tuesday morning, her chance came when she forced a hole in a screen covering the lower part of the door which was big enough for her to push her arm through. Then she started to make noise. (One recalls the way that Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl held for eight years, kept looking for a moment to run, and finally found one.) Ramsey came when Berry screamed; and yet she took a risk by trying to get the attention of a stranger. What if he had just told his neighbor, with whom, he told reporters, he’d hung out at local barbecues—“ribs and what not”—that someone in his house was being loud? “Amanda is the one,” Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said at the press conference on Tuesday morning. “She came out of that house and that started it all.”
Berry made her own 911 call at the same time as Ramsey. Her first words were, “Help me. I’m Amanda Berry.” Her name was what she wanted to get out, before telling the dispatcher, “I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years, and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now…. My name is Amanda Berry, I’ve been in the news for the last ten years.” Ramsey told ABC that one of the first things she said, after they got her out: “Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.” The reporter asked him if he’d realized what that meant—Berry’s disappearance was one of Cleveland’s famous unsolved cases. “When she told me it didn’t register until I got to call 911. And then, I’m calling 911 for Amanda Berry? I thought this girl was dead,” Ramsey replied. Or, as he described that moment of cognitive dissonance to the 911 operator, “She said her name is Wenda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is.”
For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.
Above: Exterior of the house where, on Monday, three women who had disappeared as teenagers approximately ten years ago were found alive in Cleveland. Photograph by Bill Pugliano/Getty. Lower: Amanda Berry, right, hugs her sister Beth Serrano after being reunited in a Cleveland hospital on Monday. Photograph courtesy WOIO-TV/AP.
