Transfixed by the horror of 10 years of captivity

Members of the FBI evidence response team carry out the front screen door from a house Tuesday, May 7, 2013, where three women were held, in Cleveland. AP/TONY DEJAK

CLEVELAND, Ohio—Ten years after watching Amanda Berry walk out of work for the last time, Darrell Ford stood transfixed behind a US police barricade imagining the horrors she must have endured.

“For ten years—what was he doing to her?” Ford asked Tuesday as FBI forensic experts scoured the house in Cleveland, Ohio where Berry and two other women were held captive for a decade until Berry’s dramatic escape.

“It’s just crazy,” he told AFP.

Like Berry, Ford was just a teenager when they worked together at a Burger King restaurant in a working class neighborhood. He was working the night she disappeared: April 21, 2003, the day before her 17th birthday.

“She was supposed to get a ride home,” the slight young man said as his three year-old son played with their dog at his side.

“We thought she was dead the whole time.”

While he’s grateful Berry is alive, Ford said he’s worried that she will have a hard time recovering from her ordeal.

FBI agents could be seen moving in and out of the house, removing evidence and recording the scene.

Police have released few details about what Berry and fellow captives Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight endured.

They have confirmed that Berry, now 27, has a six-year-old daughter, apparently born while she was in captivity.

DeJesus was 14 when she vanished on her way home from school on April 2, 2004. Knight, who was 20 at the time of her disappearance, was last seen at a cousin’s house on August 23, 2002, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

They were found in the home of Ariel Castro, 52, a school bus driver who has been arrested along with his brothers: Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50.

The house is shockingly ordinary.

American and Puerto Rican flags hang from the porch, which has rails that are stripped as though they’re about to be repainted.

At least one window is boarded up, but that is not particularly unusual on a low-income street with several abandoned homes and problems with crime.

What is unusual is the twisted metal where the bottom of the front door was yanked by neighbor Charles Ramsey after he heard Berry’s cries for help.

Residents at the scene told AFP that they were shocked and had no idea that the man who would sometimes grill food in his yard and share it with neighbors could have had such a grim secret locked away.

Bill McNutt, 71, said he is used to crime on the street. When he heard the sirens on Monday he thought it was another drug bust. He was stunned when a neighbor told him that three women had been held captive just up the road.

“They must have kept them chained up, because ten years, gosh,” the retired computer programmer said as he leaned on the fence of a rooming house he has run since 1973.

McNutt said he didn’t know Castro, but had been told by other neighbors that he always parked his truck in the back of the house and never went in the front door that was Amanda Berry’s eventual escape route. Mira Oberman