“My daughter was the only white kid at the party.”
A year after the crime, Séamus T’s voice still quivers when herecalls how he found his daughter Erin, then 15, lying on the roadsideon the night of January 3rd, 2009.
“Daddy, Daddy, get them offme,” she kept moaning. The girl was semi-conscious, and was soaking wetbecause her assailants had put her under a shower to wash vomit andmenstrual blood off her after they gang-raped her.
Séamus T, anIrishman who left Dublin 25 years ago, continues his job as anexecutive in a mechanical contracting firm, but he has spent much ofthe past year seeking justice for Erin.
The ordeal started as acosy reunion of three high-school girls after the holidays. Séamus Tdropped his daughter off at an apartment in Gaithersburg, Maryland, at8.30pm, and was to have picked her up three hours later.
Boys showed up at the party. “They gave her ‘jungle juice’, 100 percent grain alcohol,” Séamus T explains. Doctors at Shady Grove hospitallater found Erin had almost three times the legal limit in her blood.
Threeteenagers, then aged 16 and 17, planned the rape. One waited in thebathroom while the other two dragged Erin in. When the districtattorney read through the medical report at a seven-hour hearing onSeptember 30th, Erin’s family heard how the attackers tore flesh onthree of the girl’s body orifices. She banged her head when she fellagainst the bath tub, and was covered in bruises.