The brothers accused of holding three women captive for a decade or more grew up around their father's car lot off West 25th Street surrounded by a large family. They were smart, funny and loved classic cars. 
 
 Two, however, appeared to drink heavily, while the other battered his former wife and threatened to kill her and their children, according to friends, family and court records. Two brothers had long since stopped working, while the other was fired in November after 22 years as a Cleveland schools bus driver. 
 
 "They used to be beautiful people," said Julio "Cesi" Castro, the men's uncle. 
 
 A day after authorities arrested Ariel, Onil and Pedro Castro in the kidnappings of Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry, a troubling portrait is emerging of the men. The men, reared in a strict family, have been accused in one of the most heinous crimes in the city's history. 
 
 The three women had been in a home owned by Ariel Castro, 52, on Seymour Avenue. Police arrested him Monday night. Hours later, officers waited in unmarked cars outside a home on Kinkel Avenue, where other brothers lived. When Onil and Pedro Castro drove up, officers arrested them, neighbors said. 
 
 "They were all good kids," said Nelson Roman, a lifelong friend of the brothers. "That's why this news is devastating. It's not only horrifying to the families of the kidnapped girls, it's devastating to us, because these brothers were all very good kids who grew up in a very good family. I was shocked to see their pictures on television involved in kidnapping. We've stayed friends over the years and had no idea they were keeping girls hostage." 
 
 Cleveland Police Chief Michael McGrath said he thinks the three women were tied up and held at the home on Seymour Avenue since they were in their teens or early 20s. A 6-year-old also was found in the home, and Cleveland police deputy chief Ed Tomba said Tuesday that the girl is Berry's daughter. 
 
 McGrath and other city officials discussed the case at a morning press, but offered few details of the years-long ordeal. 
 
 Berry disappeared at age 16 on April 21, 2003, when she called her sister to say she was getting a ride home from her job at a Burger King. DeJesus went missing at age 14 on her way home from school about a year later. They were found just a few miles from where they had gone missing. Knight was 21 when she disappeared in 2002. 
 
 Safety Director Martin Flask said police got call at 5:52 from Berry and that police arrived just more than two minutes later. At 5:58 p.m., police realized they had located Berry and DeJesus. Moments later they also had Knight. 
 
 The women appeared to be in good health and were taken to MetroHealth Medical Center to be evaluated and reunited with relatives. They were released from the hospital on Tuesday morning. 
 
 Theresa Miller is the sister of Amanda Berry's mother, Louwana, who died in 2006. Theresa Miller said the person responsible for Amanda's disappearance should be charged with murder for Louwana's death. 
 
 "She died of a broken heart," said Miller, who lives on the West Side. "After all the stress, she would say, 'I can't eat. I don't know if Mandy ate.' My sister was a very strong person, but it took a lot out of her." 
 
 She said she has spoken to Amanda but declined to discuss details of her ordeal. 
 
 "It's a miracle," she said. "But I just wish her mother could be here." 
 
 As the investigation plays out, authorities continue to focus on the brothers. 
 
 Roman said Pedro Castro, 54, was a straight-A student at old Lincoln High School. Roman said he would not have graduated from Lincoln High in 1976 without Pedro's help. But Pedro dropped out of school in his junior year when he became involved with alcohol. Roman said Pedro had worked a punch-press machine in a factory, but he stopped working because he drank so heavily. He was getting Social Security benefits in recent years. 
 
 Roman said Onil Castro, 50, was much quieter than his brother Pedro. He also drank heavily. Roman said he has been receiving workers' compensation the past five years. He had made his living doing odd jobs; he was very versatile and a handyman until he got hurt working as a laborer. 
 
 Neither was married, Roman said. 
 
 Court records indicate Ariel Castro fought with his former wife, Grimilda Figueroa, over the custody of their children. Figueroa twice suffered a broken nose, as well as broken ribs, a knocked-out tooth, a blood clot on the brain and two dislocated shoulders, according to a 2005 filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. In the filing, her attorney requested that a judge "keep [Castro] from threatening to kill [Figueroa]." 
 
 Attorney Robert Ferreri said Figueroa "has full custody with no visitation for [Castro]. Nevertheless, [Castro] frequently abducts daughters and keeps them from their mother." Figueroa died last year. Ferreri could not be reached. Any record of charges being filed could not be located. 
 
 Ivan Ruiz played in the Latin band Grupo Kanon with Ariel Castro. He found it odd that Castro would never let anyone into his home, even to help carry musical equipment. 
 
 "He wouldn't let me pull up the driveway. Said there were nails or something," Ruiz said. "One time I asked, 'Do you want me to help you carry this stuff inside? It's heavy.' 
 
 "He said, 'Nah, I got it, man.' " 
 
 Equally, strange, he said, was Castro's reluctance to stay anywhere overnight. The band would book hotel rooms for trips in Cincinnati, Toledo and Pittsburgh. 
 
 "He was the only one who never stayed," Ruiz said. "He would say, 'I have to get home.' It was weird." 
 
 Police had been to the house twice, once in 2000, another time in 2004, officials said. 
 
 In March 2000, Ariel Castro reported to police there was a fight in the street. No reports of an arrest were made. 
 
 In January 2004, police went to the address after Castro, either intentionally or accidentally, left a child on a Cleveland school bus, but were unsuccessful in making contact with anyone in the home. An investigation found no criminal intent by Castro, Flask said. 
 
 In November, Ariel Castro was fired from his job as a Cleveland school bus driver for leaving his bus unattended for four hours last September while he went home. Before being fired Nov. 6, Castro had been suspended for 60 days twice -- for leaving the child on the bus and making an illegal U-turn in rush-hour traffic with a busload of students in 2009. 
 
 He also was suspended in February 2012 for using his bus to do grocery shopping. He had to sign an agreement saying any more problems would result in his termination. 
 
 In the September incident, Castro said his mid-day route was canceled, and he was tired. So he left the bus at Scranton Elementary School and walked to his home two blocks away "to rest," according to a form in his discipline file. 
 
 In 2004, a special education student at Wade Park Elementary School was left on Castro's bus after another student was dropped off, according to a Cleveland police report. The student said Castro drove to a Wendy's restaurant and told the student to "lay down b---" while he went inside to eat. He then took the student home. 
 
 Police went to the Seymour Avenue home to question Castro but no one came to the door. Castro was hired by the district in February 1991. He was earning $18.91 an hour when he was fired. 
 
 The brothers were from a family of nine siblings. Their father, Pedro, had a car lot off West 25th Street. He died in 2004. In his will, the nine children divided more than $250,000 in assets, and they were given cars, according to Cuyahoga County Probate Court records. 
 
 "They never drove junk," Roman said. 
 
 With Plain Dealer reporters Pat Galbincea, Edith Starzyk, Robert Smith, Leila Atassi and Harlan Spector and news researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan. 
 
 An earlier version of this story gave an inaccurate location for Ariel Castro's arrest. 
 
 ||||| The suspect accused of holding three women captive in Ohio for a decade was investigated by police in 2004 for abduction and endangering children after he kept a boy on his school bus for two hours. 
 
 Ariel Castro, 52, was revealed to have driven the boy around instead of dropping him off at school, at one point ordering him to "lay down, bitch". 
 
 Castro, who was fired from his job as a school bus driver in 2012, has been arrested with his two brothers Pedro, 54, and Onil, 50, in connection with the imprisonment of three women who escaped from his home in a western neighbourhood of Cleveland on Monday night. 
 
 Senior police officers have insisted they did everything they could in the course of the decade to try and find the women: Michelle Knight, who was abducted in August 2002 aged 21, Amanda Berry, who vanished the following April at age 16, and Gina DeJesus, who was 14 when she disappeared in April 2004. 
 
 But a disciplinary file prepared by Cleveland metropolitan school district shows that he was investigated by police, shortly before DeJesus went missing, in connection with two serious alleged crimes: abduction and child endangering. 
 
 On 26 January 2004 Castro picked up two children to take them to a special program to treat their attention deficit disorder at Wade Park elementary school in Cleveland. Castro dropped off one of the children but according to the police incident report the other child, a boy, was not escorted to school and stayed on the bus. 
 
 Castro came back to the bus and drove it, with the boy still present, to Wendy's fast-food restaurant where he had lunch, leaving the child in the vehicle alone. As he did so, he told the boy: "Lay down, bitch". 
 
 After eating, the report says, Castro "returned to the bus and drove around for a while. [He] parked the bus at a bus parking lot for a period of time" before finally dropping off the child about two hours after he had picked him up. 
 
 In the course of that inquiry police visited Castro's house in Seymour Avenue where on Monday night the three women escaped. But finding no one at home, officers went away and never came back. 
 
 The police report said the investigation found no evidence of sexual assault or other assault of the boy. The inquiry concluded that Castro had broken no law, though the school board suspended him for 60 days for the incident. 
 
 The disciplinary file also shows that he was reprimanded by his employers on three other occasions. He was suspended for a further 60 days for having made a U-turn in a school bus packed with students amid rush-hour traffic, an incident for which he apologised. 
 
 He was also castigated for having used a school bus to do grocery shopping, and most recently for having left a bus at Scranton school for four hours to return home. In his self-defence he handwrote a letter to the board in which he said: "I felt tired that day." 
 
 For these cumulative breaches of the rules Castro was sacked from his bus driving job in November 2012. 
 
 Authorities gave more details about the case on Tuesday. The ordeal of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight ended with a frantic 911 call on Monday afternoon, police said. 
 
 While Castro was out Berry managed to alert neighbours by hammering on the front door. Police said they were at the scene within minutes and rescued a six-year-old girl, DeJesus and Knight. 
 
 The mayor of Cleveland, Frank Jackson, admitted that the case was disturbing. "We are happy that they are returned to us. But we have several unanswered questions. Why were they taken, how were they taken and how did they remain undetected in the city of Cleveland for this time?" 
 
 Residents recounted the dramatic rescue scenes. One neighbour, Charles Ramsey, told a local television station that he heard screaming and saw Berry, whom he did not recognise, at a door that would open just wide enough to fit a hand through. He said she was trying desperately to get out and pleaded for help to reach police, so he kicked down the door to free her. 
 
 Neighbours then helped her to make a 911 call. A recording of the call was released on Tuesday, in which she said: "I'm Amanda Berry. I've been on the news for the last 10 years." She begged for police officers to come to the home before a man who had taken her returned. "I've been kidnapped and I've been missing for 10 years," she told the dispatcher. "And I'm here. I'm free now." 
 
 Officials said the women appeared to be in good health and were taken to a hospital to be evaluated and reunited with relatives. An FBI agent, Vicki Anderson, said she had met the three women a few hours after their escape. "They looked good," she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Thinner than their pictures and with big deer eyes, but they were all smiles. They were very happy to be with their families." 
 
 Authorities did not say whether the women had been sexually assaulted and added that given the trauma of what the women had endured, they were trying to be delicate with their investigation. 
 
 Neighbours said they had previously reported suspicious activity at the house to police. Elsie Cintron, 55, who lives three doors away from the Castro home, told the Guardian that about a year ago her granddaughter reported seeing a a naked woman crawling on her hands and knees out of the house. The woman returned to the house but the granddaughter called the police – Cintron said she believed they failed to follow it up. 
 
 Juan Perez, 27, who lives two doors down from Castro's home, said that he and his mother heard a scream coming from the basement about three years ago. "It was the kind of scream that made you uncomfortable so my mom called the police," he said. 
 
 Officials did not address those incidents at a press conference on Tuesday but admitted that they had visited the Castro house twice in the past 15 years. Martin Flask, the director of public safety in Cleveland, said Ariel Castro reported a fight in the street in 2000, before the women disappeared, but no arrests were made. In 2004 officers went to Castro's home after the incident with the boy on his bus.
– Friends and neighbors of the Castro brothers say there is nothing about the three men that signaled they were capable of a crime as horrific as the kidnapping and decade-long imprisonment of three young women, the Cleveland Plain Dealer finds. Onil, 50; Ariel, 52; and Pedro, 54, are members of a large and well-known family who was among the first Hispanics to settle in Cleveland. Associates describe the men as smart and funny, though Ariel has a history of domestic violence and the other two were very heavy drinkers. Onil and Pedro hadn't worked in years, while Ariel was fired from his job as a school bus driver last fall. "They were all good kids," says a lifelong friend of the brothers, who have six other siblings. "That's why this news is devastating. It's not only horrifying to the families of the kidnapped girls, it's devastating to us, because these brothers were all very good kids who grew up in a very good family." Ariel, a musician who played in local Latin bands, had become more withdrawn in recent years, his uncle tells the New York Times. "It could have been because of the hiding personality. He had to have two personalities," he says. Ariel, the only brother to have lived at the home where the women were found, had a wife and three children but that marriage ended and the other two brothers never married. One of Ariel's children, 25-year-old Emily Castro, is serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for trying to murder her infant daughter in 2007, USA Today reports. In 2004, shortly before kidnap victim Gina DeJesus went missing, Ariel was investigated by police for abduction and child endangerment, the Guardian reports. A police report states that Castro kept a child on his school bus for two hours instead of dropping him off at school, at one point ordering the boy to "Lay down, b****." Police determined that no assault had taken place and no law had been broken, though Castro was suspended from his job for 60 days. During that investigation, police visited the home at which the three women were held, but after finding nobody home, they went away and didn't return.