J-1 Visa students kipnapped and raped

By Jim Smith

BOSTON — A nationwide search is under way for a man who police say raped two Irish students at gunpoint early Saturday morning in Portsmouth, N.H.

The alleged attacker, 28-year-old Steven Gordon of Nashua, N.H., took place at Calvary Cemetery in Portsmouth after Gordon reportedly kidnapped the young women at nearby Hampton Beach while threatening them with a gun.

Police traced the assault to Gordon after he crashed his car into a gravestone while fleeing the scene of the crime. According to Captain Adam Price of the Portsmouth Police, Gordon was released from jail last year after serving five years for a sexual-assault conviction.

The students, in their early 20s, were in New Hampshire on a summer work visa. They were hospitalized after the attack and were treated for physical and emotional trauma. They are now receiving outpatient counseling and supportive services.

Price told the Echo that Gordon will be charged with four counts of aggravated sexual assault, kidnapping, and other related offenses. Police now believe that Gordon may have fled the New England area.

Despite the horror of this case, attacks on young Irish people on student visas, or J-1 visas, are not common. A spokesman at the Irish consulate in Boston said that thousands of students come across to the U.S. on J-1 visas, many of them go to the New England area, with a substantial percentage going to the greater Boston area. “Most of them do not get in trouble,” the consulate spokesman said. “Very seldom would we have a serious case such as this.”

However, when incidents do occur, they tend to be horrific. In 1995, Dublin City University honors biotechnology student Orla Benson, 22, from Muckross, Co. Kerry, was savagely raped and stabbed to death in Boston by Pedro Rosario, 30, after he lured her to a youth center around 1 a.m. on Sept. 23, as she walked home from a night out with friends. Last June, a Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted Rosario of first-degree murder and aggravated rape. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms.

Benson was in Boston on a three-month work visa. She was employed as a waitress at the Woodland Golf Club in Newton.

And in June 1994, another Irish student, Patrick “P.J.” McDonagh, 19, from Connemara, Co. Galway, disappeared while visiting relatives in Boston. Toward the end of last year his body was found in the murky water of an estimated 300-foot deep quarry, in Quincy, Mass.

McDonagh was a business student at University College in Galway.