CLEVELAND — You accumulate a lot of memories working in television as long as I have. Many of the days blend together. Some you never forget. Monday, May 6, 2013, is by far the greatest example of that. The day started off like any other in my job as the nightside reporter at News 5 in Cleveland. I was live in the 5 p.m. show on the raid of an illegal gambling operation in Lorain County and then I was off to Bay Village for a 6:30 p.m. council meeting that was going to be my 11 p.m. story.
My photographer, Tom Livingston, had met me there in a live truck, and we were killing time before the meeting in the parking lot of Bay Village City Hall. That’s when Tommy rolled down his window and said to me, “Hey, I’m being pulled, you’re staying. The assignment desk just called and said some woman called 9-1-1 saying she was Amanda Berry,” he said adding without missing a beat, “So I’ll be right back.”
That’s because the possibility of this being true was so far out of right field that we figured it was likely a hoax. Working nights, we had covered, on every April 21, the vigil marking the day of Berry’s disappearance in 2003. It was the eve of her 17th birthday, when she failed to return home after leaving her job at a Burger King on Lorain Avenue. It was a scene repeated earlier in the month on every April 2, which was the date of the disappearance of then 14-year-old Gina DeJesus, a year after Amanda, in 2004. Gina was on her way home from school when she disappeared a few blocks away, also on Lorain Avenue.
In addition, we had covered a number of false alarms over the years involving the whereabouts of Amanda and Gina that raised hopes only to have them dashed. We had also anxiously waited along with both families on two different occasions when police, acting on tips, dug up an empty lot and the garage of a home looking for Amanda and Gina’s bodies, respectively. We had been through so much with these families over the years that whenever we saw them at the vigils or on other stories we never just said hello, we hugged. So this latest news had to be just someone making a sick crank call to police, right?
But just a few minutes after Livingston left with the live truck, that perception changed when the assignment desk called my cell and in an urgent voice I was told, “You have to go, it looks like Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus have both been found and they’re both alive!”
How I didn’t get a speeding ticket I don’t know, but as I raced to Seymour Avenue on Cleveland’s west side, my stomach began to turn in a way I had rarely felt. So many years of seeing the pain and anguish in the faces of these families, could it really be ending? I called my wife on the way. She was at our son’s little league game. As a reporter, she also knew both families well from literally the early hours of each of the disappearances. I told her, “I don’t know yet if this is real, but this is where I’m headed.”
As I pulled up to Seymour Avenue, I ditched the news car on West 25th and made my way through the growing crowd. Livingston and another photographer, Rich Geyser, were already setting up the truck to establish a live shot. I began scanning the crowd looking for familiar faces, those family members I knew from the vigils, hoping to get confirmation because the police at this point weren’t saying anything.
There were plenty of other reporters there already interviewing, it seemed, everyone they could. Should I be running around like them I thought, gathering sound just for the sake of having it? No, what I need is confirmation, so I continued to calmly make my way through the crowd, and it was in doing so that I overheard a man in a white t-shirt telling his story of the rescue. The man was Charles Ramsey.
As I waited for them to come to me live on the air, I knew this was sound I had to get before he disappeared, so I grabbed Tommy Livingston and we taped a quick interview with Charles about what he saw and what he did. It was only a minute or two later when we had a live shot established that they came to me live, and as they were tossing to me from the studio you can see in the video Tommy pointing over my shoulder letting me know that Charles was still there, so I immediately brought him in and asked him to walk me through what happened. "I heard screaming, I was eating my McDonalds.” The rest is viral video history.
As the interview was going on what was going through my mind was the fact that in our taped interview a minute ago Charles had just dropped a number of curse words, so my fear was him dropping one on live TV. They were telling me in my ear to wrap it up and toss it back when Charles delivered what would be the most famous line: “I knew something was wrong when a pretty little white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Dead giveaway, dead giveaway.”
In my mind, I’m thinking OK where are you going with this? So I tried to pull the mic away. “Either she homeless or she got problems, that’s the only reason she’s running to a Black man.” I thanked him for being there and doing the right thing and tossed it back to the studio. In my mind, I was thinking it was a good interview but nothing more and so I began the process of just looking for more information, the next interview in this incredible story. I had no idea what was about to follow.
Because it was our first live shot from the street, and the networks, ABC and CNN, were desperate for information, they were taking our feed live, and, in turn, the interview, and they just ran with it. Within an hour it was being played and replayed across the country, and our website News5Cleveland.com was exploding with hits as the video was quickly becoming viral.
The global news vacuum, in the early stages of this story, transformed Charles in a matter two-to-three hours from a guy eating Mcdonald's to an international figure. As a result, every network wanted Charles Ramsey for their morning show the next morning, but Charles, in his rush to get off the street, left his cell phone in his house, so no one could get a hold of him. So, absent Charles, they ran the next best thing, the interview again.
Before leaving work that Monday night, one of my co-workers said, “You watch, this is going to get autotuned,” something I had never heard of before. He explained it’s when an interview gets so big it’s set to music and if it’s really big the Gregory brothers will take it on. Within 24 hours they did under the aptly named title “Dead Giveaway.”
With the song and with the attention, Charles Ramsey began the process of moving from news figure to pop icon, with the interview popping up on shows like TMZ and in the monologue of late-night talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel. “There aren’t too many people who can turn an interview about a kidnapping into an evening at the Apollo,” joked Kimmel, “but he pulled it off.”
The raw interview and the autotune “Dead Giveaway” are easy to find. Google “greatest television interview ever” and there it is. Both have well over 100 million views. Once it hit that mark five years ago I stopped trying to count. It’s been parodied on Saturday Night Live by Eddie Murphy and the autotune was the inspiration for the Netflix series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”
I was not the first person to talk to Charles Ramsey that night, and I wasn’t the last. All of the stations got him, but for some reason, that 2:56 interview was the one that went viral.
It’s been five years since I’ve seen Charles, though we still keep in touch through text once or twice a year but always, always on May 6.
