Aijalon Gomes, Former North Korean Prisoner, Found Burned, Dead In San Diego

A man who was freed from North Korea with the help of former President Jimmy Carter in 2010 was found burned to death over the weekend in a dirt lot in Mission Bay Park, San Diego, police said Tuesday.

According to the New York Post, 38-year-old Aijalon Mahli Gomes was seen ablaze in a field late Friday by an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer, who tried to help him and also alerted the local fire department. However, Gomes died at the spot.

Police believe that Gomes’s death could either be an accident or suicide. The case is being investigated.

Born in 1979, Gomes was a teacher from Boston, Massachusetts, who spent two years giving English lessons at Chungui Middle School in Gyeonggi-do Province, South Korea, before he was apprehended while trying to cross into North Korea in the beginning of 2010.

A devout Christian, Gomes regularly attended the Every Nation Church in Seoul, and it is believed he crossed into North Korea to act as a missionary and offer humanitarian aid.

Gomes flew from South Korea to China’s Yanji Chaoyangchuan Airport on Jan. 24, 2010 and travelled to Tumen City. On Jan. 25 he crossed the Sino-Korean border by walking across a frozen stretch of the Tumen River into North Korea.

He was immediately arrested by border guards for illegal entry into North Korea. Later on Apr. 6, 2010, he was sentenced to eight years of hard labor. He was also fined $700,000.

In June 2010, Pyongyang threatened harsher punishment for Gomes if the U.S. continued with the aggressive approach it had adopted following the sinking of a South Korean warship, the ROKS Cheonan.

The United Nations Security Council had concluded the ship was sunk by a North Korean submarine, a charge denied by Pyongyang, which further warned it would be compelled to apply wartime laws to Gomes if tensions were not eased.

That would have meant a life sentence or even the death penalty. The following month it was reported that Gomes had been hospitalized following a suicide attempt.

Meanwhile, activities were on to get Gomes released, including a persistent human rights letter-writing campaign which began at the beginning in April, 2010.

In August of the same year, a U.S. consular envoy visited Pyongyang to request permission to bring Gomes back home but the effort was unsuccessful.

This is when former President Carter stepped in, and flew to North Korea to personally negotiate Gomes’s release.

It was stressed both by the Obama administration and Carter that his trip was a private humanitarian effort, and the former president was acting solely in his capacity as a private citizen, and not on the behalf of the United States government.

According to a report in CNN, Carter reached Pyongyang on Aug. 25, 2010, and on the following day, Gomes was released. According to the report, Carter made an apology to Kim Yong Nam, the president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly of North Korea, for Gomes’s illegal entry into North Korea. He assured him that such a case will never be repeated.

Gomes, who had recently moved from Boston to San Diego, published his autobiography "Violence and Humanity" in May 2015.

After Gomes’s death, his mother Jacqueline McCarthy told that she plans to set up an online fundraising page to help cover funeral costs, reported the New York Post.