Jurors Deciding Case Against Irish Firefighter Accused of Raping Boston Woman
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Jury deliberations have begun in the trial of a firefighter from Ireland accused of raping a woman in a Boston hotel on St. Patrick’s Day weekend in 2024 — the second time the case has gone to court.
Terence Crosbie, 39, of Dublin, Ireland, has pleaded not guilty to one count of rape in connection with the incident at the Omni Parker House in Boston on March 15, 2024. His first trial began in June but ended in a mistrial after four days of jury deliberations and five days of testimony.
Jury deliberations began Wednesday afternoon and continued Thursday morning for a full day, after the trial began Oct. 14.
Prosecutors say Crosbie, a member of the Dublin Fire Brigade, was visiting Boston with a group of other firefighters over the St. Patrick’s Day weekend last year when he raped a 28-year-old woman at the hotel the group was staying at. He then tried to leave the country after an interview with police.
On March 14, 2024, one of the other men from the firefighters group had met the woman at the Black Rose, an Irish pub near Faneuil Hall, at around 11:30 p.m., prosecutors said, and she chose to go back to the Omni Parker House hotel with him.
She had consensual sex with that man in a room at the hotel and they fell asleep in separate beds. But at 2 a.m., she awoke to a man she didn’t know — later identified as Crosbie — raping her, prosecutors said.
The woman testified during the second trial that began Oct. 14, and told the courtroom Crosbie was “on top of me, inside of me,” and held down her shoulders, reported Ireland outlet The Irish Times.
Crosbie told her, “You like this,” and “He couldn’t give this to you ... he’s a loser,” she told the courtroom, the outlet reported. She was emotional as she recounted her experience and broke down in tears during questioning.
The woman told him to stop and was able to roll off the bed but Crosbie kept following her around the hotel room — pushing her against the wall and kissing her — as she tried to grab her clothes. She ran away from him into the bathroom, then skirted around him to the door and left.
The woman then texted her friend to say she had been assaulted and went to Mass General Hospital, where she reported the rape. Hotel security footage matched the woman’s story, and she identified the man who’d shared a hotel room with Crosbie as the man she’d had consensual sex with.
Prosecutors told the courtroom there was a DNA sample found from two men, WCVB reported — but that neither could be definitively linked to Crosbie.
Nonetheless, prosecutor Erin Murphy argued, the woman “had no reason to leave a hotel room in the middle of the night and immediately disclose to a friend because she got raped, then go to a hospital and be interviewed by police.”
“She had no reason to do it, and drinking alcohol didn’t make her do it,” Murphy said.
But Crosbie’s attorney, Daniel Reilly, said in his closing argument that there’s “nothing that includes or matches Mr. Crosbie,” the outlet reported.
“Despite this, they want you to believe it is him because who else could it be, but their own witness says they cannot say it came from Mr. Crosbie,” Reilly said, according to WCVB.
Crosbie told police in an interview that he’d seen the man he was staying with come into the room with the woman and left to give them privacy, the report said. Hours later, he entered the room after knocking and saw the woman leave but didn’t interact with her, he told police.
Massachusetts State Police arrested Crosbie on the tarmac at Logan Airport just before the plane he was on was set to depart for Ireland, the district attorney’s office previously said.
He’d changed his flight to an earlier day after an interview with police.
During his arraignment, a judge held Crosbie on $100,000 bail, the district attorney’s office said. The judge had also ordered him to surrender his passport and to stay in Massachusetts.
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