Reuters/Cleveland

The three Cleveland women found alive after vanishing in their own neighbourhood for about a decade were rescued from a house that authorities tried to visit several years ago, police said yesterday.
Three brothers, one of them a school bus driver who owns the Cleveland house where the three women and a child were rescued on Monday, are under arrest, police said at a news conference.
A relative of one of the women, teenagers when they disappeared, described their survival as “a miracle” as Cleveland authorities and residents grappled with how they went unnoticed for so long.
Police said a six-year-old girl rescued with them is believed to be the child of Amanda Berry, now 27, whose screams for help alerted a neighbour and led to their release following her frantic 911 call on Monday evening.
“Help me! I’m Amanda Berry. ... I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for 10 years and I’m here. I’m free now,” Berry can be heard telling a 911 operator in a recording of the call released by police.
Police arrived to find Berry along with Gina DeJesus, now 23, who vanished in 2004, and Michelle Knight, now 32, who went missing in 2002, police said.
They also discovered the child, who would have been conceived and born during Berry’s captivity, police said.
Berry had last been seen leaving her job at a fast-food restaurant the day before her 17th birthday in April 2003, and DeJesus was last seen walking home from school.
After their rescue, the three women were taken to hospital, where they were reunited with family and friends, and released yesterday.
“If you don’t believe in miracles, I suggest you think again,” DeJesus’ aunt Sandra Ruiz said to reporters yesterday in Cleveland. Her comments were televised by local station WJW.
“This is a miracle,” Ruiz said. But she added: “Watch who your neighbour is because you never know.”
Ariel Castro, 52, a school bus driver, was arrested, as were his brothers Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, police said.
“We believe we have the people responsible,” Cleveland Deputy Police Chief Ed Tomba said.
Cleveland officials said they were investigating how the young women could have gone unnoticed in the neighbourhood where houses sit close together, typically separated only by a driveway.
Children and Family Services authorities went to the house in January 2004 after Castro had left a child on a school bus, Mayor Frank Jackson said at the news conference.
They “knocked on the door but were unsuccessful in connection with making any contact with anyone inside that home,” he said.
The deputy police chief Tomba said that Castro was “interviewed extensively” during that investigation and no criminal intent was found regarding the child left on the bus.
That visit to the house was more than a year after Knight disappeared and a few months after Berry went missing.
“We have no indication that any of the neighbours, bystanders, witnesses or anyone else has ever called regarding any information, regarding activity that occurred at that house on Seymour Avenue,” the mayor said.
FBI and other law enforcement officials were searching the house on the west side of Cleveland, close to where each woman was last seen. Tomba said police were also investigating other properties but did not elaborate.
A mood of jubilation grew as word spread that the women had been found alive in the blue-collar, Latino neighbourhood where the two-storey house was cordoned off with crime-scene tape.
But residents said too that they were perplexed by the case.
A man who helped to look for DeJesus, Pastor Angel Arroyo, said he and her family members had handed out flyers years ago in the neighborhood where she was found.
“We didn’t search hard enough. She was right under our nose the whole time,” Arroyo said.
Before the disappearances, in March 2000, police said they responded to a call from Ariel Castro reporting a fight in the street.
During her 911 call, Berry can be heard giving the dispatcher Castro’s name and urging police to come quickly. She indicated that she knew her disappearance had been widely reported in the media.
The neighbour who came to her aid told police he heard Berry trying to get out of the house and helped her kick out the bottom of a locked screen door.
“The real hero is Amanda,” Tomba said. “She’s the one that got this rolling.”
There was no word on the fate of a fourth missing girl, Ashley Summers, who disappeared from the same vicinity in July 2007 at age 14.
City Councilwoman Dona Brady, a friend of the Berry family, said that Berry’s grief-stricken mother had not survived to see her daughter rescued. “She literally died of a broken heart,” Brady said, adding that the mother died aged 47.
The discovery of the three women was reminiscent of the case of Jaycee Dugard, who was snatched from her northern California home at age 11 by a convicted sex offender, Phillip Garrido, and kept in captivity for 18 years before being rescued in 2009.
During that time she was repeatedly raped by her abductor and gave birth to two girls fathered by him. Similar cases of abduction and incarceration have been reported during the past decade in Austria and Italy.

Imprisonments of young women: precedents


The dramatic discovery of three young women who were abducted around a decade ago in the US state of Ohio and were kept imprisoned in a house in Cleveland has several infamous precedents:
 US - August 26, 2009: Jaycee Dugard was kidnapped as an 11-year-old and repeatedly raped over 18 years by Phillip Garrido, who had been released from jail. He fathered her two children. She was kidnapped by Garrido and his wife Nancy while on her way to school in South Lake Tahoe, California, in June 1991. She was rescued in August 2009 after Garrido’s parole officers became suspicious. The Garridos were jailed for life.
AUSTRIA - August 23, 2006: Natascha Kampusch was abducted by Wolfgang Priklopil at the age of 10 and kept prisoner in a cellar in a house in Strasshof, just outside Vienna, for eight years before she managed to escape in 2006. Priklopil committed suicide on the night that Kampusch escaped by throwing himself under a train.
AUSTRIA - April 2008: Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned and raped over a period of 24 years by her father Josef Fritzl, who kept her in the cellar of the family home at Amstetten, 100km west of Vienna. She bore him seven children. The case came to light when one of the children became ill and had to be hospitalised. Found guilty of murder for the death of one of Elisabeth’s babies, as well as incest, sequestration, grievous assault and 3,000 instances of rape, the father was jailed in 2009 for life - a sentence carrying a minimum 15 years in Austria.
ITALY - June, 2008: Maria Monaco, 47, was set free after being locked in by her family for 18 years. Police found her living in “horrendous hygiene conditions” in a rural home outside Santa Maria Capua Vetere, north of Naples. She had been held since 1990 when her family learned she was pregnant and she refused to divulge the name of the father.
JAPAN - January 2000: An unidentified nine-year-old Japanese schoolgirl was snatched in November 1990 and spent nine years trapped on the second floor of her abductor’s home in Kashiwazaki, about 250km north of Tokyo. She was freed aged 19 after health officials were called to the house by the man’s mother. The kidnapper was in 2003 sentenced to 14 years in prison.