Charles Ramsey's Interview

Overview

Charles Ramsey is a Cleveland, Ohio resident who rose to internet fame in early May 2013 after assisting three women who had been missing for nearly a decade escape from their captor’s house. As the shocking story unravelled, Ramsey appeared in an interview segment for a local news report and gave a colorful account of how it all happened. Following the YouTube upload of the interview clip, Ramsey instantly became hailed as a hero on the web.

Background

On May 6th, 2013, Amanda Berry, Georgina DeJesus, and Michele Knight, three women who had been missing for a decade, were found alive in a residential area south of downtown Cleveland, Ohio. According to the news reports, the women were able to escape from their captor’s house with the assistance of Charles Ramsey, a neighbor who promptly responded to Amanda Berry’s call for help and set them free by kicking a hole in the locked door. Later that same day, Ramsey appeared in a news interview with ABC affiliate NewsNet5 and provided a colorful witness account.

Notable Developments

On Reddit

During the early hours of May 7th, several news articles, image macros and discussions related to the story were featured on the front page of Reddit^[2], with many readers fixating on Ramsey’s role in the rescue and his memorable quotes from the news interview clip. By 6 p.m. (ET), more than 130 posts^[3] about Charles Ramsey had been submitted to the site, including quite a few image macros praising him as a hero dubbed “Good Guy Charles Ramsey.”^[4]

On Twitter

Around the same time, American stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt posted a tweet conveying his admiration for Ramsey. Within 14 hours, the tweet received over 2,200 retweets and 1,100 favorites.

Dear Charles Ramsey: I am not a little pretty white girl, but I totally want to run into your black arms. #hero
— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) May 7, 2013

According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy,^[5] tweets mentioning “charles ramsey” peaked on May 7th at 9:49 a.m. ET (shown below). Throughout the day, the keywords “Charles Ramsey” were listed as a worldwide trending topic on the microblogging and social networking site.

At 11:11 a.m. (ET), the viral content site BuzzFeed^[6] posted a compilation of notable tweets referencing Ramsey, many of which included image macros joking about the video (shown below, left) and Totally Looks Like photos comparing Ramsey to the villain Sho’nuff from 1985 martial arts film The Last Dragon (shown below, right).

At 2:40 p.m. (ET), the official McDonald’s Corporation Twitter feed congratulated Ramsey for his bravery and said they would “be in touch.”

We salute the courage of Ohio kidnap victims & respect their privacy. Way to go Charles Ramsey- we’ll be in touch.
— McDonald’s Corp. (@McDonaldsCorp) May 7, 2013