After a six-day trial and more than 22 hours of jury deliberations, a Dublin firefighter arrested on rape charges in a US city last year remains behind bars, his fate still in limbo.
A Boston judge declared a mistrial and the jury âhungâ on Friday, sending the jury of eight men and four women home, and Terence Crosbie (38) back to the Nashua Street Jail.
If a retrial moves forward, Mr Crosbie will once again face charges for raping a 29-year-old attorney.
The alleged assault was first reported to authorities by the woman at a hospital in the early hours of March 15th, 2024.
The night began at The Black Rose, an Irish pub in the city on one of the busiest nights for the bar, leading up to St Patrickâs weekend.
The woman alleged she returned to the hotel room of a Dublin firefighter she met at the bar for a night of consensual sex. She was with a man she described as a little shorter than herself, bald, white, with an Irish accent and who authorities later identified as Liam OâBrien.
Mr Crosbie and Mr OâBrien had travelled to Boston as part of a Dublin Fire Brigade contingent that was due to march in the cityâs St Patrickâs Day parade.
The woman claimed she fell asleep in the other bed and woke up to another man who âwas not baldâ but who âalso had an Irish accentâ raping her. The man, she claimed, mocked Mr OâBrien and insisted that she âwanted itâ.
All this occurred to the âdull background soundtrackâ, as a prosecutor put it, of Mr OâBrienâs continuous snoring.
âOur nightmares belong in our sleep,â prosecutor Daniela Mendes told the jury in her opening statement on the first day of trial.
âHer nightmare began as she woke up.â
Throughout, Mr Crosbie was steadfast in his insistence that he was wrongly accused and had been held behind bars for 15 months, unable to make bail or afford living costs in the foreign country.
âIâm going to ask you to consider Mr Crosbieâs nightmare. Iâm going to ask you to end that nightmare,â said defence attorney Daniel C Reilly in his closing argument to the jury.
The assault allegedly took place at the historic Omni Parker House, the hotel made famous as the location where a young US politician named John F Kennedy proposed to Jacqueline Bouvier. The case was heard blocks away at the Suffolk Superior courthouse, an art deco relic with marbled hallways and wood panel courtrooms in the heart of Boston.
The jury heard testimony from the woman and Mr Crosbie, with assistance from a transcript, at times, to parse Mr Crosbieâs accent.
His defence team alleged the woman was a âless than reliable reporter due to intoxication and memory lapsesâ. They argued that she did not remember Mr OâBrienâs first or last name or having ever met Mr Crosbie. They made insinuations about her promiscuity and questioned her about psychiatric medication on the stand.
On the other side, the prosecution alleged Mr Crosbieâs testimony was ârehearsed and insincereâ.
The woman was the prosecutionâs first witness. She testified that on Thursday, March 14th she had been hosting a social work gathering, went to a restaurant with colleagues afterwards and then to The Black Rose with a coworker.
In cross-examination, Mr Crosbieâs legal team asserted she had been out drinking for more than 10 hours.
A witness for the defence â Dr Chris Rosenbaum, who serves as the director of medical toxicology for Newton Wellesley Hospital â testified that the complainant reported a âprior history of binge drinkingâ in her medical documents and that her blood alcohol level at the time she reported the assault the next morning can âcorrelate with memory loss and impairmentâ.
He said she could have been almost three times the legal driving limit at the time of the alleged assault.
Prosecutors argued that she had her wits about her. They played CCTV video of The Black Rose from the evening in question. In the witness box, she pointed herself out in the video to jurors as the individual dancing âvery awkwardlyâ and trying to get others to join in.
She said Mr OâBrien and his colleagues were wearing T-shirts identifying themselves as members of the Dublin Fire Brigade.
CCTV video later showed her and Mr OâBrien entering the hotel, just before midnight, taking the elevator and walking towards room 610.
Other video footage showed Mr Crosbie walking to a lobby area on the sixth floor, adjust the chair and scroll through his phone for the next two hours.
The woman said she didnât know Mr OâBrien had a roommate. CCTV video and hotel records later supported Mr Crosbieâs testimony that they met briefly at the bar and he was briefly in the room when the woman and Mr OâBrien first arrived, and that he âread between the linesâ and quickly left the room.
She testified that after having sex with Mr OâBrien she went to the bathroom and left the light on. When she returned Mr OâBrien was already asleep and taking up the majority of the bed, so she got into the other bed and fell asleep, intending to leave and work from home the next day.
She told the court she âwoke up to somebody on top of meâ raping her, she told the court, in tears.
âThis person was taller than Liam and was not bald and I could hear Liam snoring,â she said.
The woman testified that the man, who prosecutors said was Mr Crosbie, also disparaged Mr OâBrien, while assaulting her, saying that Mr OâBrien âcanât even do this for you â what a loserâ.
She testified that she could feel his weight on top of her and she told him to âstop!â But he didnât, the court heard.
When she eventually managed to manoeuvre her legs off the side of the bed and break free, and started to collect her clothes, she testified that Mr Crosbie continued to follow her around the hotel room, trying to kiss her.
She said she went to the bathroom and that Mr Crosbie tried to get in and âwas jiggling the handleâ after she locked the door.
Under cross-examination, defence attorney Mr Reilly noted that she initially reported that the assailant was about her height and her testimony did not include details about Mr Crosbieâs birthmarks or tattoos.
âI was trying not to look,â she said.
The prosecution noted that she texted a friend at 2.18am as she left the hotel.
âI hate everyone,â she wrote. âWhat the f*** is wrong with people.â
âI woke up and a guy was inside of me telling me I wanted it and telling me how pathetic it was that his friend couldnât give that,â the court heard.
She then walked home, changed and went to hospital, bringing the clothes she wore in the hotel. There she reported the rape.
DNA analyst Alexis Decesaris testified that the evidence collected from the woman was âconsistentâ with there being âtwo individualsâ separate from her who were both male.
There was a high likelihood that one of those male profiles belonged to Mr OâBrien, the court heard, but due to the limited amount of material collected it was unclear if the second set of male DNA, obtained from the womanâs genitals, was deposited by Mr Crosbie.
The defence argued that the testing âdid not identify Terence Crosbieâs DNAâ.
Prosecutors argued that the finding of two male profiles matched the womanâs account.
The jury heard from Mr Crosbie twice, in a recorded police interview before his arrest, and as the concluding witness when he took the stand in the trial.
âI 100 per cent didnât do this. Iâve done nothing wrong,â Mr Crosbie said.
âI had no physical or sexual contact with her at all.â
He said he knocked on the door when he returned to the hotel and shouted for Mr OâBrien. He said the room was dark and he âheard no replyâ. He said he used the torch on this phone to find his way to his bed and the complainant wasnât there.
âThere was nobody in my bed, my bed was empty,â he told the court. He said he brushed clothes off his bed, and crawled under the covers in his boxer shorts.
About a minute and a half after he got into bed he testified that he heard someone ârummaging around the roomâ and assumed the woman was collecting her things to leave.
He disputed the womanâs account that he called Mr OâBrien a loser; this was not âan Irish termâ that he would use, he argued.
Mr Crosbie claimed he attempted to fly back to Dublin on an early flight home because he was âscared like a rabbit in the headlightsâ after being questioned by police.
When Mr Crosbie took the stand, prosecutors also played a portion of his interview with police that had been previously redacted in which he told detectives he had masturbated in the hotel room and asked whether his DNA could have got on the complainant that way. A pair of Mr Crosbieâs underwear with semen on it was later collected as evidence.
In cross-examination, prosecutors pointed out that Mr Crosbie would not have had time to masturbate alone in his room until after the alleged assault. Mr Crosbieâs defence team stressed that his story about masturbation was âhypotheticalâ.
In closing arguments, prosecutor Erin Murphy told jurors that they âmight not agreeâ with or ârelateâ to the complainantâs choice to go to the hotel with Mr OâBrien but that it was âher choiceâ.
âThat doesnât mean that that manâs hotel roommate gets to rape her,â she said.
Mr Crosbie is not the âunluckiest man in the world; he is the man who raped [the woman] and he is the man who got caughtâ, she told the jury.
Mr Reilly argued that prosecutors had not met their âhigh burdenâ of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
âI suggest to you there are multiple reasonable doubts in this case,â he said.
