Slain doctor’s family travel to US
Patrick McGovern, a partner with Patrick Cox solicitors in Dublin, accompanied his mother Josephine on the flight. They are expected to stay with Brian's wife, Anne Jennings, and the couple's children, Caitríona and Deirdre, at the family home in the suburb of Boxford.
Funeral arrangements are being handled by Campbell Funeral Home in nearby Beverly, close to the hospital where Dr Jennings, a kidney specialist, works.
Mrs McGovern, known as Jo, left her home in Sutton, Co Dublin, after being comforted by neighbours and friends. One neighbour described her as "a lovely woman" and said she had been "devastated" by her son's death.
Dr McGovern, 47, originally from Stiles Road, in Clontarf, was in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital on Tuesday when he was gunned down by hospital secretary Colleen Mitchell, 51, who then shot herself.
When police entered her apartment yesterday they found 40 rounds of .38-calibre ammunition, and a gun cleaning kit. Investigators also found personal papers and two bottles of anti-depressants.
Police yesterday painted a grim picture of what trauma workers saw when they entered Dr McGovern's office in the hospital. He was lying on the floor, to the right, and Ms Mitchell was slouched against the wall with a .38-calibre revolver beside her.
She shot him three times; one bullet grazed Dr McGovern's right arm, indicating a defensive wound.
The new details shed little light on a motive for the shooting of Dr McGovern, whom friends recalled as a man who helped underprivileged children and led his class at University College Dublin.
Later, as a husband and father, he loved to watch his eldest daughter Caitríona,16, play soccer, and he had just returned from a whitewater-rafting trip with his family in Ecuador.
"His family was everything to him,' said Dr David Keane, also from Dublin, who had worked with Dr McGovern at the hospital since 1995.
"He was not one to play golf or ski on his own it was always with his family."
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