Word that Michelle Knight had escaped from the Cleveland house of horrors came as a double shock Wednesday to her twin brother Freddie.
“I was freaking happy as hell because I didn’t know my sister was kidnapped,” he told CNN. “My mother never tells me anything.”
Freddie Knight said his mom, Barbara, kicked him out of the house when he was 14 and he was estranged from the rest of the family. But the years melted away when he saw his sister at the hospital.
“I hugged her because she wanted a hug,” he said. “My sister is going to move on, forget the past …. leave it behind, start anew.”
Knight, who is believed to be 32, was reportedly beaten repeatedly by her captors and suffered hearing loss and damage to some of the bones in her face.
But few other details have been emerged about Knight, who vanished Aug. 23, 2002 shortly after losing custody of her baby son. She escaped Monday with two other women from the Cleveland house where they had been held as prisoners for a decade.
Barbara Knight, who lives in Naples, Fla., said before seeing her daughter that she was “probably angry at the world.”
“She thought she would never be found but thank God somebody did,” Knight told the “Today” show Wednesday before heading to Cleveland to reunite with her daughter.
Knight said she continued searching for her daughter long after the Cleveland police relegated Michelle to their list of possible runaways.
“Certain people said she didn’t want nothing to do with me, but still in my heart I thought, ‘No, because I knew my Michelle,'” she said. “They figured she just left because of the baby and everything.”
Police have already conceded that they paid more attention to the disappearances of the younger women Knight had been imprisoned with — Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry.
Knight reportedly had a troubled childhood and dropped out of high school at 17 after she was bullied by classmates.
It was shortly after that trauma, her mother said, that Knight got pregnant and had her baby.
Now she has a 10-year-old stepsister named Katie, who was born while she was in captivity.
csiemaszko@nydailynews.com
