On Friday afternoon in Boston, at the Suffolk Superior Courthouse, a jury decided the fate of a Dublin firefighter charged with rape after a previous jury failed to do so.
Terence Crosbie (39) was found guilty of raping an attorney in a shared hotel room while his colleague Liam O’Brien snored.
The jurors, six men and six women, took frequent notes throughout the proceedings and returned a guilty verdict on the 16th hour of deliberations, to audible cries and sobs from the defendant’s supporters seated in the front row of the gallery.
The case was previously tried in June before a jury of eight men and four women. That jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
RM Block
This time Crosbie was convicted of raping a 29-year-old woman as she slept. The assault occurred in the Omni Parker Hotel in Boston city centre in the early hours of Friday March 15th, 2024, after the victim had consensual sex with Mr O’Brien. He was another member of a contingent of Dublin Fire Brigade members who had traveled to Boston to march in the city’s St Patrick’s Day parade.
Before his arrest Crosbie had been assigned to Phibsborough fire station in Dublin, according to testimony.
The victim met Mr O’Brien at The Black Rose bar on Thursday night, March 14th, 2024. The fire brigade members had flown in earlier that afternoon and Crosbie testified that he had drinks with colleagues at several local bars – The Dubliner, Emmets and Beantown Pub – before ending up at The Black Rose.
The victim had hosted a social work function for her legal non-profit organisation earlier that afternoon. She arrived at The Black Rose that night with two friends from work.
Crosbie’s defence presented a case that broke down into a ‘he said/she said’ story: there were “only three people were allegedly present in room 610 of the Omni Parker House” and Mr O’Brien was “supposedly asleep” and “refused to testify”. The burden of reasonable doubt fell on the prosecution with Crosbie insisting he never touched the woman.
In a press conference after the verdict, district attorney Kevin R Hayden said this case was about more than one person’s word. He thanked the victim for her “courage and her fortitude” but he also thanked the jury for looking at “all the evidence, and there is a significant amount of evidence here”.
Mr Hayden said the biggest hurdle in trying cases such as these was “societal norms”.
“No means no, and when women don’t consent, they don’t consent. That’s what we’re raising the standard up against every single time we try one of these cases and put a jury in the box,” he said.
And yet, with both Crosbie and the victim testifying in both trials, much still boiled down to a question of who to believe – in addition to CCTV video, hotel records and DNA evidence collected from the victim revealing two unidentified male contributors.
Crosbie was present every day in court in both proceedings. He was released into the courtroom by the court officers, free from handcuffs in the presence of spectators and jurors. He was met by subtle nods from a contingent of male supporters who did not speak to the press, flanking a woman identified in testimony as Crosbie’s wife and the mother of his two daughters. Throughout the proceedings Crosbie turned to her regularly and on several occasions mouthed: “I love you.”
The victim appeared only for opening statements, her own testimony and closing arguments. She sat alone in the gallery in the June trial; in the second trial she was joined by a companion.
In her absence, the jury was asked to assess the victim’s credibility, consider evidence taken from inside her body, her alcohol consumption, psychiatric medication and testimony from medical experts regarding her competency at the time she reported the assault.
She had sent a friend a series of texts at 2.18am as she was leaving the hotel: “I hate everyone.”
“What the f**k is wrong with people,” she wrote.
“I woke up and a guy was inside of me telling me how much he knew I wanted it and how pathetic it was his friend couldn’t give that.”
She walked home, changed her clothes and brought those clothes with her in a bag when she arrived at the hospital an hour later to report the assault.
“The jury has spoken,” said the lead prosecutor, assistant district attorney Erin Murphy, after the verdict.
The challenge in trying this case “was never the evidence”, she said.
“The difficulty was knowing what the defence would be: [that] this was just the word of a woman, this is a woman who drank alcohol, confused and not knowing what happened to her own body.”
The defence drew attention to the victim’s alcohol consumption in both trials and the fact that she did not recall Mr O’Brien’s first or last name. But in the second trial, defence did not touch on this point as frequently.
The first trial was presided over by Judge Sarah Ellis. The second was presided over by Judge Joshua Wall.
The prosecution also sought to limit the testimony of paid defence expert witness Dr Chris Rosenbaum, who never directly treated the victim. He testified in the first trial that the victim’s blood alcohol level could “correlate with memory loss and impairment”. In the second trial the defence did not call Dr Rosenbaum before the jury. Crosbie was the defence’s sole witness.
Jurors in the second trial also heard that when Crosbie was initially questioned by police, he asked whether the complainant had alleged that someone had “pinned her down” in the bed, before he was informed by officials that that was in fact her allegation – an account that hadn’t made it into the first trial.
In the second trial the defence was able to raise the possibility of a contaminated DNA sample or DNA left by a male contributor indirectly.
After the jury announced their verdict, Crosbie’s wife put her head in her lap and began to cry. Crosbie did not turn around.
A Suffolk Superior Court officer placed a hand on Crosbie’s shoulder as the judge revoked his bail, handcuffed him and took him away.
Crosbie has remained in remand at the Nashua Street jail since his March 2024 arrest.
His sentencing date is October 30th. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
