The troubled Princeton grad charged with fatally shooting his financier father rejected a plea deal Tuesday that would let him dodge a potential life sentence.
“Are you at all interested in the plea that the district attorney is offering?” Justice Melissa Jackson asked Thomas GIlbert Jr. after a weeklong hearing in his murder case.
“Ahh, no, Your Honor,” replied the bedraggled defendant, wearing an orange jumpsuit.
Assistant District Attorney Craig Ortner offered Gilbert Jr. a deal of up to 25 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea to first-degree manslaughter. If convicted at trial, he faces up to life in prison on the top count of second-degree murder.
His mother, Shelley Gilbert, made a brief statement to reporters outside the courtroom.
She said her family was unable to get him the mental help he needed prior to the shocking crime.
“The laws and procedures involving mental illness in the state of New York are medieval,” she said of the inability to have her son, who suffers from schizophrenia, involuntarily committed.
“Had our family had access to the kind of care for Tommy he needed, this horror story would never have happened,” the grieving mother said.
The failed stockbroker has been locked up since his arrest for the January 2015 killing of his 70-year-old father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., after his dad slashed his weekly allowance.
Shelley complained that her son has repeatedly been found mentally fit for trial despite his obvious mental deficits.
Gilbert Jr. has claimed that he’s being poisoned by radioactive fallout at Rikers Island and also bizarrely requested that the Iraqi consulate be subpoenaed in his case.
Defense lawyer Alex Spiro requested the hearing to try to bar Gilbert Jr.’s statements to authorities and evidence seized from his apartment at his trial. But the judge ruled against him Tuesday.
During the hearing, a detective revealed the moment Shelley had to tell Gilbert Jr.’s sister of her father’s death.
Claire Gilbert, then 25, was at a packed downtown church for Sunday Mass when her mother and a detective showed up out of the blue.
“She knew something was wrong,” Detective Joseph Cirigliano testified.
“Mrs. Gilbert told Claire, ‘Daddy’s dead and Tommy shot him.’ She [Claire] let out a cry, which stopped the entire Mass. Everybody turned and looked at us,” the detective recalled.
Cops had rushed Shelly to the church, concerned that her son, who was still at large, could be a danger to his sister. Claire started sobbing uncontrollably, and Shelley put her arm around her, Cirigliano said.
In the back seat of the police car, Claire continued to sob as Shelley tried to comfort her, the detective said.
“Claire keeps saying, she said several times, ‘I thought he was getting better? You said he was getting better. You said he was on medication,’” he recalled.
“At that point Mrs. Gilbert said, ‘It happened, it’s just you and me and now we got to deal with it,’” the cop recounted.