Missing Women Found Safe

Found! Three women kept prisoner for a decade in Ohio house

• 
  
• From Post Wire Services
• 
  

19 Action News/WOIO

FREEDOM: Amanda Berry (center) celebrates her liberation with family and friends yesterday.

Three women escaped a living nightmare yesterday when someone finally heard their cries for help from inside a suburban Ohio home where they had been held prisoner after disappearing a decade ago.

Amanda Berry, 27, and Gina DeJesus, 23 — who went missing as teenagers — were found alive and well after a neighbor heard screams coming from the house in Cleveland.

Michelle Knight, 32, was also found in the home. She disappeared in 2000 when she was 20 years old.

“We’ve confirmed it’s them,” a detective told Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. “They are alive and safe.”

REUTERS

FBI handout photos show Amanda Marie Berry (left), missing since she was 16, and Georgina Lynn Dejesus, missing since she was 14.

The miraculous discovery occurred when a neighbor, who happened to be home from work, heard shouting coming from the house and went to investigate.

“I heard screaming . . . I come outside and I see this girl going nuts trying to get out of her house,” neighbor Charles Ramsey told Cleveland’s WEWS-TV.

“I go on the porch and she said, ‘Help me get out. I’ve been here a long time.’ ”

Another neighbor then helped break down the door and free the desperate young woman, who they later discovered was Amanda Berry.

As soon as she escaped, Berry called 911 from the Ramseys’ home and told police she was the girl they’d been searching for all these years.

“Help me, I’m Amanda Berry,” she said in the frantic 911 call. “I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for ten years and I’m here — I’m free now.”