Michelle Knight

That all sort of played out in the 90s.

On August 23rd, 2002... 21-year-old Michelle Knight disappeared after leaving her cousin's house the day she was supposed to appear in court to try to get custody of her son, who'd been placed as a ward of the state following an injury that allegedly happened while in the care of her mother's boyfriend.

Judging from the scant notes in the police report on her disappearance, the police did not investigate very much, writing her off as having a mental condition and being frequently confused by her surroundings and declining to commit resources to her disappearance because she was an adult.

Don't worry, that's not the last time that the Cleveland Police Department's gonna look

completely fucking incapable.

On April 21st, 2003, Amanda Marie Berry disappeared the day before her 17th birthday.

She'd called home around 8pm to tell her sister she was getting a ride home from work at the Burger King that was about four miles from Castro's house, and which was only about four blocks from where Michelle Knight was last seen when she disappeared just eight months prior.

The FBI classified her as a runaway for a week until

Mm.

At the same time, I think that maybe police officers would have thought that the responses of Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus-

Yeah

...

They quickly recognize 23-year-old Gina DeJesus, another kidnap victim that they've spent years searching for.

There's also a 32-year-old woman named Michelle Knight inside.

Shortly after the discovery, TV journalists are swarming the place.

They're live from Seymour Avenue everywhere, and within hours, this is a front page headline around the entire world.

But here in Cleveland, especially on Seymour Ave, a few really big questions remain.

One, how were there three kidnapped women inside this house in plain sight for 10 years? And also, how were they just less than four miles from where they were taken? But let's go back just a minute, because I wanna talk about how each of these women ended up here.

So the first victim is Michelle Knight.

She was born on April 23rd, 1981.

In 2010, a computerized sell order triggered a flash crash on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones Industrials to a loss of nearly 1,000 points in less than half an hour.

In 2013, kidnap-rape victims Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight, who went missing separately about a decade earlier while in their teens or early 20s, were rescued from a house just south of downtown Cleveland.

Their captor, Ariel Castro, hanged himself in prison in September 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1,000 years.

And in 2020, New York City began shutting down its subway system overnight to allow for additional cleaning and disinfecting of cars and stations amid the pandemic.

So there are so many aspects to this that will be resonating for so many people.

You're right, Michelle Knight, it's so... genuinely upsetting.

There's the human story at the heart of it, Jason Arday.

And then there are so many people right now at this point in this country, courtesy of this Labour government and all other governments and the system and the party and all other parties in this country who are feeling, there but for the grace of God go they, that they haven't succumbed in the way that this poor, poor man has.