New York (CNN)Once a part of Manhattan’s social elite, a 30-yr-vintage Princeton graduate lived off his dad and mom, prosecutors say, spending his time surfing in the Hamptons — till he killed his father over a cut to his weekly allowance. “It wasn’t until the dad started cutting off his cash that the defendant determined to kill him,” said Craig Ortner, an assistant district legal professional with the Manhattan district attorney’s workplace. “Literally hours before he turned into killed, (his father) further reduce his allowance to $three hundred.”
Thomas Gilbert Jr., now 34, has declined to seem in person for an awful lot of his 5-week trial on expenses including homicide and gun ownership. However, he became a gift for remaining arguments Wednesday, sporting a white button-down blouse and slacks, his gaze reduced. As he’s acknowledged to own family and buddies, Tommy is being held at the Rikers Island jail. Defense lawyer Arnold Levine says his consumer isn’t guilty via cause of madness and has refused to cooperate along with his personal legal professionals.
His father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., became a founding coping with a companion at Wainscott Capital, a rewarding hedge fund, prosecutors say. Thomas Jr. Is a former Princeton football participant who graduated with a degree in economics. At the time of the capture in January 2015, he becomes 30 and unemployed, receiving $1,000 a week from his parents. Prosecutors and his personal legal professionals do no longer dispute that he killed his father. Jurors will, as an alternative, be tasked with identifying whether or not he is responsible for the expenses — which additionally encompass counts for forgery — or no longer guilty with the aid of motive of insanity. The murder charge carries a sentence of 25 years to existence in prison.
‘Nobody desired to think it.’
Gilbert spent his younger years at highly-priced, particularly selective East Coast non-public faculties. His attorney showed jurors snippets of his grades, SAT rankings, and teacher evaluations from high school. “Tommy’s work — indeed his whole way — this time period has been the success story I nonetheless thrill to witness,” wrote an instructor from his sophomore yr. But, Levine stated, Gilbert “deteriorated” around the time he commenced to wait for Princeton.
“Nobody wanted to examine him — that history, the ones seem, that education — and say he will be mentally sick,” Levine stated. “Nobody desired to think it.” His former therapist, Susan Evans, testified that she noticed him several years earlier than taking pictures. His preoccupation with paranoid thoughts changed into “interfering” with his capacity to function. “I don’t trust he become operating or ever labored all through that time,” Evans said. “Earlier on, he was preparing inventory summary reviews for a friend of his father’s. I think that he failed to preserve that up.”
Evans recommended that Gilbert be screened for paranoid schizophrenia in the months before the incident. Other former medical doctors testified that they prescribed him an antipsychotic medicinal drug. Evans testified that he did now not take his prescribed medications for a maximum of the time she noticed him. Emails between Gilbert and his mother and father that were proven in court depict a tumultuous courting. He, again and again, asked for money, occasionally “for a charity component,” every so often forwarding beyond-due payments from a one-of-a-kind athletic and social club for thousands of greenbacks to his mother. In October 2013, Gilbert emailed his father, asking him for space.
“The greater you respect my space, the greater I will admire you!” he wrote. Weeks later, he emailed his mom numerous times soliciting hundreds of greenbacks for a garage, garments, and stock offerings. He bought a gun within the summer of 2014, prosecutors say, and some months later, his father started out discussing decreasing his allowance. A voicemail from Thomas Sr. Describes his desire to foster economic independence in his son, but the protection stated that Thomas Sr. Had lots of dollars in credit card debt.
In October 2014, prosecutors say, Gilbert’s pc showed searches for websites that mentioned forging assessments and supplied blank test templates. Some of the costs he faces stem from credit card forging gadgets located at his domestic on the time of his arrest, prosecutors say. In November 2014, prosecutors say, his laptop confirmed searches for websites like “Hire-a-Killer.Com” and “Find-a-Hitman.Com.” Shortly after, Thomas Sr. Emailed his son, telling him his weekly allowance might be reduced from $800 to $600. The day of his demise, he changed his normal deposit into his son’s account to $300, bank statistics confirmed.
The killing
On January four, 2015, Shelley Gilbert observed her husband on their bedroom ground in their Manhattan apartment with a gunshot wound to his head and a gun on his chest. Minutes before, Gilbert had are available and cleared his mother out of the apartment, asking her to get him a sandwich and a drink, she testified. Levine has argued that his patron became clinically insane for the duration of the shooting. But prosecutors and their medical experts say he knew that what he become doing changed into incorrect.
Prosecutors factor to surveillance pictures that indicate Gilbert, carrying a hoodie and wearing a gymnasium bag, getting into his family’s posh rental building simply after three p.M. And leaving much less than 15 mins later.
Forensic psychiatrist Jason Hershberger, who did not individually look at Gilbert because he declined to be visible, testified that he had examined Gilbert’s scientific statistics and facts related to the incident. “I know that he shot his father,” Hershberger testified. “I recognize that his father becomes located as though he had shot himself. The gun becomes in his hand as if he had committed suicide. Then Thomas left the scene. He turned off the location reveal [on his phone]. He became in his domestic in the darkish when the police came to knock on his door. He pretended he wasn’t there.”
