And that's after having been freed by President Carter in 2010 after having been captured in North Korea.

Then 30 years old, Gomes made international headlines in 2010 when he illegally crossed into North Korea from China by walking across a frozen stretch of the Tumen River, and was soon after apprehended by border guards. He was sentenced to eight years of hard labor and fined $700,000.


“I was praying each and every day,” Jacqueline McCarthy, Gomes’ mother, said Tuesday when reached by phone at her Massachusetts home. “They would not let me talk to him.”


Gomes, who had been teaching English in South Korea at the time, may have entered North Korea in support of Robert Park, a Korean-American human rights activist, according to some media accounts.

And from CNN http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/22/us/aijalon-gomes-dies-california/index.html

Gomes documented his ordeal in "Violence and Humanity," a self-published e-book from 2015. According to the book's author biography, Gomes was educated in Massachusetts public schools before attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he earned a degree in English. He pursued a career in education in the suburbs of Massachusetts before moving to South Korea to teach in the rural provinces of Seoul.


Gomes taught English to middle school students for two years before crossing into China, "inspired by his faith and sense of universal equality," according to the book's description.