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." ||||| Photo by FBI via Getty Images 
 
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 Two of the missing women who were just found alive in Cleveland, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, had been the subject of much media coverage over the past ten years; the Cleveland Plain Dealer called them “two of Cleveland's most famous missing persons.” The other woman, Michelle Knight, hadn’t received nearly as much attention. It’s worth asking why. 
 
 
 
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 Knight was either 18 or 20 years old—her age has been reported differently in different articles—when she disappeared in 2002 from her cousin’s house in west Cleveland, only a couple blocks away from where Berry and DeJesus would vanish in 2003 and 2004, respectively. At the time, Knight was apparently upset that she had lost custody of her son, and authorities believed she had run away of her own volition. As such, the investigation into Knight’s disappearance was short-lived. Knight doesn’t even appear to have been listed in the official Ohio Missing Persons database. 
 
 Photo by FBI via Getty Images 
 
 According to a Plain Dealer article, though, Knight’s mother, Barbara, “never believed that her daughter would disappear without a trace, without so much as an occasional phone call.” Barbara Knight continued to search for her daughter for years thereafter, periodically posting missing-person flyers around the west side. According to the Plain Dealer article, she searched alone. 
 
 You can understand why, at first, Michelle Knight’s disappearance might not have struck the police as particularly suspicious. Knight was a legal adult when she vanished, and there was nothing stopping her from leaving home and severing all family connections. What’s more, the police report into her disappearance notes that Knight “had a mental condition and frequently was confused by her surroundings,” which perhaps led them to believe she might have wandered off. News reports indicate that most of Knight’s family members believed that she left of her own accord, which means that—her mother’s flyers notwithstanding—there probably wasn’t much family pressure on police to advance the investigation. 
 
 If Knight had been a minor when she vanished, then her case would undoubtedly have received more police attention. As I wrote earlier today, a 14-year-old girl named Ashley Summers disappeared from west Cleveland in 2007 after a fight with her family. Though she was deemed a runaway at the time, the investigation into her disappearance nevertheless continued, and her case was consistently mentioned in connection with those of Berry and DeJesus.
– 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."