Louwana Miller – Amanda Berry’s Mother

Amanda Berry, one of the three rescued kidnap victims in Cleveland, visited her mother’s grave in Ohio. Louwana Miller died while Amanda was still missing and she never got to see her daughter again. She spent three years searching for her. It is said that Miller died of a broken heart.

“She went to the cemetery this morning,” Curtis Berry, Amanda’s uncle told the Daily News on Monday.

Amanda disappeared on April 21, 2003, she was walking back home after finishing her shift at Burger King. When she didn’t make it home, her mother Louwana called the police who opened the case as a missing teenager.

A week later, Louwana Miller’s hopes raised when she received a phone call from her daughter’s cell phone, according to the Plain Dealer. But the call apparently wasn’t enough to help investigators.

Since her daughter disappeared, Louwana Miller held vigils, walks and interviews with media to publicize the missing person case.

In 2004, a year after Amanda went missing a day before her 17th birthday, Miller appeared on an episode of The Montel Williams Show, where a psychic named Sylvia Browne told her that Amanda was dead. This event shook her but Miller never gave up hope that she would see her daughter again.

“I still don’t want to believe it,” Louwana Miller told the newspaper after the show. “I want to have hope but … what else is there?”

Louwana Miller died in March 2006 at age of 43, after being hospitalized for months with pancreatitis and other ailments, without ever learning that her daughter was alive. Reportedly she ended up dying of a broken heart because of her daughter’s disappearance.

27-year-old Amanda Berry was rescued, with other two other young women and Amanda’s 6-year-old daughter Jocelyn, on May 6 after nearly a decade in captivity by Ariel Castro, who is in jail and being held on $8 million bail.