On Tuesday, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper interviewed Charles Ramsey, the man who freed Amanda Berry, Georgina DeJesus and Michelle Knight from captivity in a Cleveland house. Ramsey told Cooper that he was 'having trouble sleeping' knowing that he had been living next door to the residence in which three men were allegedly holding the women hostage. "Up until yesterday the only thing that kept me from losing sleep was the lack of money," he said. Ramsey, a restaurant dishwasher, had been living for about a year in the rundown neighborhood on the West Side of Cleveland. Scroll down to the video to watch Ramsey recount how he helped free the missing women.
The interview with Cooper gave the nation another glimpse of a man who shot into the spotlight after an interview with a local news station went viral. "I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms," he said then. "Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway."
After a clip of the interview made the rounds on the Internet, comedian Patton Oswalt posted a tweet that garnered over 5,000 re-tweets. "Dear Charles Ramsey," he wrote, "I am not a little pretty white girl, but I totally want to run into your black arms. #hero."
An Autotune version of this initial interview laid over a backing beat has also emerged, perhaps inevitably. Scroll down to the link at the bottom of the page to watch it.
In the CNN interview, Ramsey told Cooper that the key to his actions - for which he is being called a hero - was a simple matter of having "cojones".
"You've got to put that being a coward and 'I don't want to get in nobody's business,'" he said. "You got to put that away for a minute."
Ramsey's familiar way of addressing his interviewers and raconteurial knack have quickly made him the subject of delight among viewers eager to know who helped the missing women escape their captors (54-year-old Pedro Castro, 50-year-old Onil Castro and 52-year-old Ariel Castro, who neighbors say lived at the house, have all been jailed). His earlier accounts of the three men emphasized their apparent normality and sociability, saying, "I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot and listen to salsa music."
At the start of the CNN interview, Anderson Cooper asked Ramsey to tell him what had happened yesterday.
"You going to love this," Ramsey told Cooper. "I'm going to tell it all."
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