CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The day after learning that Michelle Knight was one of three women rescued from a decade of captivity in a Seymour Avenue home, her mother said she hopes her now 32-year-old daughter will be able to resume her interrupted life. 
 
 Contacted by phone at her home in Florida, Barbara Knight said she has had limited contact with Cleveland police since the news broke Monday night and is still relying on media reports for updates on her daughter's condition. 
 
 And she said she finds it hard to believe that the woman discovered in the home of suspect Ariel Castro, 52, is really Michelle, having had her hopes dashed in the past by false reports. 
 
 Barbara Knight said she hopes she and her daughter will reunite -- and that she can atone for the role she played in her daughter's troubled life leading up to her disappearance on Aug. 23, 2002. 
 
 Michelle Knight lived most of her life on the city's West Side, with many of her happiest childhood days spent in a house on West 60th Street, her mother said. 
 
 There, she helped her mother work in her vegetable garden and loved to feed apples to the neighbor's pet pony. 
 
 Michelle became fascinated with the fire engines that occasionally raced down her street en route to emergencies, and after a tour of the local fire station, set her heart on one day becoming a firefighter herself, her mother said. 
 
 But Michelle loved animals too, and after she helped her mother deliver the family Shih Tzu's litter of puppies, she decided that becoming a veterinarian might be a better fit, Barbara Knight recalled. 
 
 Michelle had many friends and seemed to enjoy school, especially art class, where she developed a talent for sketching, Knight said. 
 
 But trouble began when Michelle was 17 years old and told her mother that she had been the victim of an assault at school. Knight said her daughter reported the incident to police but felt that her story was not taken seriously. 
 
 Soon afterward, Knight became pregnant and decided to drop out of school. She dreamed of eventually completing her education to provide her son a better life. 
 
 But Barbara Knight said that among her own greatest regrets was becoming involved with an abusive man, whom, she believes, injured her toddler grandson -- spurring a chain of events that led Michelle to lose custody of the child. 
 
 She vanished not long afterward, on a day when she was scheduled for a court appearance in the custody case, Barbara Knight said. 
 
 The Cleveland police's missing-person report detailing Michelle Knight's disappearance is brief, stating that she had a mental condition and frequently was confused by her surroundings. She was last seen at a cousin's house near West 106th Street and Lorain Avenue, the report states. 
 
 It also noted that she answers to the nickname "Shorty." 
 
 But apart from those notations, Barbara Knight said, police did little to investigate the disappearance and theorized that Michelle likely left of her own accord, embittered by the custody battle. 
 
 Knight said that wasn't her daughter's nature. So she papered Cleveland's West Side with fliers, and even after moving out of state, would often return to continue the search on her own. 
 
 Knight said she believes she once saw her daughter walking with an older man at a shopping plaza on West 117th Street several years ago. When the woman trailed behind her companion, he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her along, Knight said. She said that she yelled Michelle's name, but the woman did not turn around. 
 
 City officials reported Monday that Michelle Knight -- along with the other captive women, Gina DeJesus, 23, and Amanda Berry, 27 -- have been discharged from the hospital. 
 
 Barbara Knight and a cousin said they are frustrated by a lack of information from city police. They said they have yet to be told where Michelle was taken after leaving the hospital and when they can see her. 
 
 
 
 Knight also said she gave police a photo of her daughter when she filed the missing-persons report years ago and is disheartened that it has not appeared in media accounts alongside those of Berry and DeJesus. 
 
 The family has no other photo of Michelle to provide to the media. 
 
 
 
 Knight said she hopes to hear her daughter's voice soon, and that Michelle might consider joining her in Florida to start her life anew. 
 
 "I really miss her," Knight said. "She was my daughter, but she was also my friend. She tried to make the best of her life and wanted to finish school. She never got the chance to go back." ||||| Police have yet to charge the three brothers accused in Cleveland's most high-profile kidnapping case in years. 
 
 All three men - Ariel Castro, Onil Castro and Pedro Castro - remain in police custody. Although the usual protocol between the Cleveland Division of Police and the Cleveland Municipal Court is that detectives file charges within 36 hours, Administrative Judge Ronald B. Adrine has extended the charging period in this case to 48 hours, which is within the federal mandate for charging time. 
 
 Meantime, more details are emerging about the lives of three women held captive in a west side Cleveland house for years. 
 
 According to 19 Action News Reporter Lydia Esparra, Gina DeJesus knew the man suspected of kidnapping her and holding her captive for nearly 10 years. 
 
 Family members tell Esparra that Ariel Castro was a relative of DeJesus' best friend, possibly her father. 
 
 He's also been to at least two vigils for the missing girls. 
 
 Amanda Berry and her daughter Jocelyn, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were found in a house on Seymour Avenue Monday afternoon. Berry was heard by a neighbor screaming for help. The neighbor, Charles Ramsey, helped free Berry and a young girl, 6, believed to be Berry's daughter. 
 
 Berry then called 911 begging for help. 
 
 "Help me, I'm Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped and I've been missing for ten years and I'm here. I'm free now." 
 
 Officers arrived to the scene within two minutes of getting the call, and recovered Berry and the little girl. DeJesus and Knight then came out of the home. 
 
 Berry went missing in 2003 a day shy of her 17th birthday. DeJesus disappeared as she walked home from school in 2004 at the age of 14. Knight went missing in 2002 at the age of 20. 
 
 "Words cannot describe the emotion," said FBI Special Agent Stephen Anthony. "Yes, law enforcement officers do cry." 
 
 "Prayers have been answered," he added. "The nightmare is finally over and the healing can begin." 
 
 Multiple sources confirm two of the women were often held in the basement, and one woman in a room upstairs. Law enforcement sources have told 19 Action News that one of the rooms had chains hanging from the ceiling. 
 
 Reporter Ed Gallek also learned that one woman told police she had gotten pregnant more than once, but her captor beat her and she ended up losing the babies. 
 
 Former CMSD school bus driver Ariel Castro, 52, and his brothers, Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, are in police custody. Charges are forthcoming. 
 
 Police were called to Castro's west side home two times - once in 2000 for a fight in the street and again in 2004 after Castro inadvertently left a child on his school bus. Nothing criminal came of that investigation. 
 
 "Amanda Berry is the real hero," said Deputy Chief Ed Tomba. "She is the one that got this rolling. Without her, none of us would be here today." 
 
 Neighbors on Seymour have been captivated by the story unfolding before their eyes. 
 
 "Unless they built some sort of dungeon I cannot believe someone did not notice something," one neighbor said. 
 
 Maria Castro Montes is only too sorry that the accused kidnappers are her cousins, who she says have shamed the family name, "Our pain is minimal compared to the pain of those girls." 
 
 Media from around the world have come to tell the story as well. 
 
 
 
 The Cleveland Branch of the FBI wants people to call 216-522-1400 to provide any tips relative to this investigation. 
 
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– For all the attention given to the amazing story out of Cleveland, the wire services as of this evening still hadn't managed to move a photo of Michelle Knight, one of the three women rescued. It was a similar story a decade ago, when the disappearance of Knight, now 33, got far less attention than the cases of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus. Why? Unlike the other two, Knight was a legal adult at the time and had just lost custody of her toddler. Police concluded that she probably left town of her own accord, her mother tells the Plain Dealer. Barbara Knight, who now lives in Florida, recounts that her daughter started having trouble about age 17, when she dropped out of high school upon becoming pregnant. And then this: "Barbara Knight said that among her own greatest regrets was becoming involved with an abusive man, whom, she believes, injured her toddler grandson—spurring a chain of events that led Michelle to lose custody of the child," says the story. Michelle Knight disappeared the day she was due in court for the custody case. Though police gave up on the disappearance quickly, Barbara Knight kept putting up fliers and searching for her daughter in vain. She now hopes for a reunion but isn't sure it will happen. "In hindsight, it seems clear that the Cleveland police should have done more to look for her," writes Justin Peters at Slate, though, in fairness, we don't have all the information about her case. "At this point, it looks like Michelle Knight slipped through the cracks."