This country let Marioara down

The teenager had been in the country for only three weeks before she was abducted and murdered, writes Barry Cummins

When she was enticed into a car by a Dublin criminal on the afternoon of Sunday, Jan 6, 2008, Marioara Rostas was six weeks short of her 19th birthday. Weighing just eight stone and standing at 5ft 3in, Marioara looked much younger than her 18 years.

Life was tough for her and her family in Ireland. Marioara’s parents and other members of her family were in Ireland three months, but Marioara was only here three weeks before she was abducted and murdered.

She arrived on Dec 17 and joined her family at a derelict property in Donabate in north Co Dublin.

Marioara had little English but the man who pulled up in a 01 Louth-registered Ford Mondeo somehow managed to convince her to get into his car.

Her 15-year-old brother Dumitru would later tell that the man gave him €10, and he understood his sister was going to get a McDonald’s meal for them and would be back soon. Dumitru never saw his sister again.

Neither Marioara nor her brother would have known that the man in the car was an extremely dangerous criminal from Dublin’s south inner city.

Can you imagine the terror Marioara felt as she realised in the following moments that she was not being brought back to her brother, but was in fact trapped in a car, unable to raise the alarm? She was in a new country, didn’t speak the language, and was physically no match for her abductor. You could not imagine a more vulnerable victim of abduction, and perhaps this is what her killers were thinking. Maybe they thought no one would really notice a Roma teenager gone missing from Dublin?

Although physically frail, Marioara was resourceful. She somehow got access to a mobile phone and managed to reach her brother in Romania.

It was a disjointed conversation. Marioara was terrified. She told her brother that she was being held captive, that she had been driven about 200km and that she had been violated by a number of men. She read out the letters B, R, I and D from a sign that she could apparently glimpse out of the window of her makeshift cell. That phonecall was not enough to save Marioara’s life, but she left gardaí vital clues. Marioara may have been disorientated and incorrect about being transported 200km, but perhaps she was indeed taken by her captors to another property some distance outside of Dublin before being taken back to the city and locked up. The letters B and R would appear to have been part of the Brabazon St sign, with the letters I and D from the word Sráid.

By the time someone set a fire at the house at Brabazon St on Feb 28, 2009, Marioara’s body was hidden in a forest between Manor Kilbride and the Sally Gap in Co Wicklow.

This country let Marioara down, but this country can now do right by her and catch and convict the Irish criminals who thought they could get away with abducting and killing a Roma girl on a whim.

* Barry Cummins is a reporter with RTÉ’s Prime Time. He is also the author of Missing and Without Trace. A longer version of this article appeared in the Irish Examiner on Jan 28, and can be read at exa.mn/rostas