Where is seymour avenue cleveland

The two-storey building stands right in the middle of a tree-lined street in Cleveland's West Side neighbourhood - a working-class area home to a close-knit community. Few details have been confirmed about what it contains, but some facts are known. The property has four bedrooms, a bathroom, a sq ft 71sq m basement, two porches and an attic. There is also a detached garage.

The continuing investigation and charges of kidnap and rape levelled at Mr Castro centre on what happened to the women while they were in the house. Ariel Castro's son, Anthony - who says he visited the house just two weeks ago - told MailOnline that the doors to the basement, the attic and the garage were always padlocked and family members were not allowed to go there. Anthony Castro described his father as a violent and controlling man, who beat him and nearly killed his mother in the early s.

After years of abuse, his mother decided to move out of the house in , taking him and his three sisters with her, Mr Castro said.

That I was physically at the house two weeks ago while that was going on, it's a lot to grasp," he said. Police are yet to release any pictures from the inside of the property, but one law enforcement official has described the conditions there as "abysmal at best".

Media reports also suggest that the authorities have discovered chains and tape inside the house allegedly used to restrain the women. A police report suggests the women were all initially kept chained in the cellar, but eventually allowed to live on the second floor of the house. One report cites the victims as saying the "big inside door" of the home was usually locked when Mr Castro went out.

On Monday, he apparently forgot to lock it as he went to a nearby McDonald's. Even so, Amanda Berry was afraid to break open the locked storm door because "she thought Ariel Castro was testing her," said the police report. Instead, she tried to get the attention of neighbours to help; her screams were heard by Charles Ramsey who lived across the street and came to the rescue.

Police say officers were sent to the house twice, in and One of the most controversial finds took place on a working-class street in Cleveland, Ohio. Once upon a time, Seymour Avenue was home to a man called Ariel Castro. Despite having the same first name as the Little Mermaid, this was no Disney story. Inside, authorities discovered tape and chains which were used to restrain the women among other things they refused to disclose. To make matters worse, Ariel had a child with Miss Berry and forced the other women to deliver it without the aid of a doctor.

Upon realising this, Google Maps blurred out the house, meaning you couldn't zoom into it no matter how hard you tried Unless you were mischievous like us and found a way around it. Once, at a meeting to settle a neighborhood dispute about a broken window, he got so angry that a prosecutor sent him to jail overnight to cool off.

In jail, he accused the cops of acting like Nazis. A jailer sucker punched him and gave him a black eye. Margaret was homebound then, sick with lung cancer. Carol dropped out of school in the 10th grade to care for her. Margaret died in , when she was 42 and Carol was Until this spring, Carol would drive by the house on her way to appointments at MetroHealth Medical Center and tell whomever she was with that she used to live there.

She felt sick the day it was torn down. Almost everyone who lived in the house in its years moved on to something more, a better life. At 19, Carol Brady moved in with her aunt in Eastlake, where she met her future husband, Richard Brady, a carpenter. They had three girls and a boy together. She sold the house to Augustine and Carmen Munoz, who lived there with their kids from to Edwin Castro and his wife, Antonia, acquired the house from the Munoz family around the same time he bought a Spanish-language record store three blocks away.

Maria Castro-Montes, Ceci's daughter, grew up in the apartment above her father's store. Her memories of her uncle Edwin's house, a half-block away, are of parties at Christmas, New Year's and birthdays — adults gathered in the basement singing carols in Spanish, children running around in the bedrooms upstairs.

In the s, Edwin and Antonia moved, rented out the house for a while, then sold it in to Ariel, their nephew. Today, they live in a hilly stretch of North Royalton, near a lagoon lined by pine trees. Their new house, a colonial built in , is twice the size of the 1,square-foot house on Seymour.

His former address reminds Edwin Castro of when his family was young, when he labored to make a better home for them. But since May, his warm memories of each room slide terribly into the knowledge of what his nephew did there afterward.

I know exactly where the girls were kept. After the Boston Marathon bomber's arrest, Maria thought, He must've had a crazy family. Three weeks later, her own cousin drew the nation's attention from domestic terrorism to homebound terror. Ariel Castro came to Cleveland around , the year he turned He was born in Puerto Rico. When his parents separated, and his father, Pedro, came to Cleveland and opened his used-car business, he stayed with his mother, Lillian.

They later moved to Reading, Pa. In court, and in a note found in his house, Castro claimed he was sexually abused as a boy. If that happened, it was likely before he came to Ohio, says Castro-Montes. She says Castro's mother asked him about his abuse story during a jail visit. Either he didn't want to hurt her with the fact, or there was nothing to tell. In , he moved with his family to West 98th Street. He started seeing a neighbor there, Grimilda Figueroa.

They had a son and three daughters together, and she became his common-law wife, despite their often hostile, abusive relationship. After Castro bought Seymour from his uncle in April , he, Figueroa and the kids moved in together. Once they were under the same roof, the abuse escalated.

On the day after Christmas , inside the house, Castro hit Figueroa in the head and face, threw her to the ground and kicked her. Their year-old son, Anthony, ran out the front door. Castro chased him, and Figueroa locked the doors and called the police. The cops caught Castro running through yards on Seymour and arrested him behind the house three doors down.

It was his second domestic violence arrest involving Figueroa, but a grand jury voted to not indict him. Castro also threatened the owners of the houses next door. In , Ernesto Santiago stopped by to check on his rental property, Seymour, noticed its chain-link fence was gone, and asked Castro about it.

Castro got angry, tried to hit Santiago with a shovel, and told Santiago he'd "take care of him. Castro also appears to have gotten into a heated dispute with Ayana Stokes, who lived at Seymour.

In August , after she moved away, she told police that Castro drove to her new home, pulled up at the driveway and shouted out the window, "I'm gonna get you, bitch! Even in the s, Castro shut off parts of the house and limited others' movements within it. Anthony has said his father nailed some windows shut and put locks on the basement door, attic door and garage.

Castro sometimes kept Figueroa from leaving the house. Nearly every room was filled with hoarder's clutter. Castro stacked cases of canned goods, such as Goya beans, next to the fridge. Every time his washer died, he brought another one through the outside cellar doors and set it up next to the others. Each woman Castro kidnapped knew one of his daughters, and he used that fact to lower their guard as he offered them rides, then made up reasons to swing by his house and invite them in.

He hadn't prepared in advance, leaving his captive chained to the pole in the low-ceilinged, sandstone basement while he readied the second floor. In April , he told Amanda Berry she could come in to see his daughter, Angie. Upstairs, Berry looked through the hole where a doorknob should've been and saw Michelle Knight in a bedroom. Castro told Berry that Knight was his roommate.

In , again in April, he told Gina DeJesus, his daughter Arlene's best friend, that he needed help carrying a speaker to his car. Castro screwed a handle and an I-bolt lock onto the outside of one bedroom door. He nailed two heavy closet doors — eight-panel, solid wood — across the window.

In the small pink bedroom next door, he cut a hole in the ceiling and stuck a box fan into it from the attic above. Through a hole in the wall, he strung a rusted chain.

In late summer , a sheriff's deputy went to Seymour three times and knocked on the door. He was trying to serve Castro with a temporary protection order that barred him from any contact with his ex-wife. Castro had broken her nose twice, broken her ribs, knocked out one of her teeth and dislocated both of her shoulders, according to her petition for the order. He threatened to kill her and their daughters three or four times in alone.

But no one came to the door. By then, four people were living inside the house, but three could not answer.

Castro hung alarm clocks on the front door and wired them together to create a makeshift alarm system. Next to it, the little lace curtain that had once shaded the door's stained-glass window dangled from one hook. He ran one wire all the way through the house to a contact switch on the back door. He blocked the stairs with a porch swing.

Family visited rarely, and when they did, Castro kept them waiting outside before he'd open the back door. He'd always play loud music and insist they stay in the kitchen. One daughter had stayed close to him.