Irish Firefighter Sentenced to Prison for Raping Boston Woman
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A member of the Dublin fire brigade who was convicted last week of raping a woman in a hotel room while visiting Boston during St. Patrick’s Day was sentenced to 7 to 9 years in prison on Thursday, court records show.
A jury convicted Terence Crosbie of a single count of rape last week after a trial in Suffolk Superior Court, Crosbie’s second this year after a jury came back hung during his first trial in June. On Thursday, Judge Joshua Wall handed down the sentence for Crosbie, who will serve his time at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center, the state’s only maximum security prison.
Crosbie will be credited with more than a year of time served, court records show.
The rape took place in the Omni Parker House on March 15, 2024, hours after Crosbie and other members of the fire brigade visited a Boston pub.
The woman had consensual sex with another firefighter at the hotel after they met at the pub. It was when Crosbie returned to the room, which he and the firefighter were sharing, that he raped the woman.
At 2 a.m., the woman awoke to a man she didn’t know — later identified as Crosbie — raping her.
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 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 said DNA samples from two men were found, but neither could be definitively linked to Crosbie, WCVB reported.
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 he saw the man he was staying with enter the room with the woman, so he left to give them privacy, according to a police report. 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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