American hostage killed in Algeria was OU grad

GRANTS PASS, Ore. — A 1985 graduate of the University of Oklahoma was one of three American hostages killed over the weekend during a siege at a natural gas complex in Algeria.

Gordon Lee Rowan, 58, graduated from OU with a bachelor of science in petroleum engineering.

Friends said Rowan was planning to retire soon to his family’s cabin in a tiny, former gold-mining town in northeastern Oregon so he could spend more time hunting, fishing, snowmobiling and

visiting family, friends said Tuesday.

A petroleum engineer who felt safe working at the remote outpost in the Sahara, Rowan had spent Christmas in California with one of his two sons and then began a monthlong shift at the gas field, friends Toni Thompson and Myron Woodley said.

“The biggest thing is just the senselessness of it, and the fact he was so close to being able to retire and kind of start his life again,” after the death of his wife 31⁄ years ago, said Thompson, the retired city recorder of Sumpter, Ore., and a longtime friend of the Rowan family.

A State Department official said Rowan was one of two hostages that militants wanted to exchange for prominent terrorism suspects jailed in the U.S.

Rowan had worked on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and the South China Sea, as well as Algeria, Thompson and Woodley said.

Woodley said Rowan was involved in fracking old wells at the Sahara site to get more oil and gas out of them.

“He didn’t take his retirement like he intended to,” Woodley said. “He told them he would come back ’til the end of this year or ’til he finished that new job he was on.”

His wife and mother died within days of each other about 3½ years ago, and about a year ago, Rowan moved from Mesa, Ariz., back to Oregon, taking over his family’s Aframe cabin in Sumpter, a town of about 200 people in the Elkhorn Mountains, they said.

He had put a new roof on it and was remodeling the interior.

A photo on Facebook shows him standing outside the cabin holding a huge icicle.