In 2005, exactly 10 years before shooting his wealthy financier father to death, Thomas Gilbert Jr. told a psychiatrist he planned to buy a gun. The doctor made a note about it and wrote, “He is clearly a very disturbed young man.”
In early 2012, Tommy, then 27 and blonde, blue-eyed and 6-feet-3-inches tall, informed his latest psychologist, Dr. Susan Evans, that he was again thinking about buying a gun. Now delusional, he had become convinced that his best friend and roommate was hacking into his phone to steal his secret hedge fund algorithm.
Several months later, he told Dr. Evans that he had started searching for guns on the Internet. She was so concerned that she referred it to Dr. Michael Sacks, the professor of psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College, who had been treating Tommy for many years for an array of mental conditions.
“We talked about it,” Dr. Sacks later wrote in his report. “He said he had done it out of curiosity. He denied having any … homicidal ideation.”
Dr. Sacks decided that Tommy’s actions did not meet the requirements of the New York SAFE (Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement) Act, which prevents the dangerously mentally ill from purchasing firearms.
After that, Tommy’s mental condition deteriorated. He beat up a man on a Brooklyn street, before burning his family’s historic house in the Hamptons to the ground. When Dr. Sacks heard about the brutal street attack, he changed his mind, deciding Tommy now met the SAFE Act requirements, and reported him. But this could not stop him obtaining the murder weapon illegally through the Web.
In January 2015, a couple of months after the street attack, Tommy arrived unannounced at his parents’ plush Upper East Side home, armed with a Glock 40-caliber handgun from an Ohio dealer he’d met on a Facebook guns-for-sale forum. He sent his mother, Shelley, out for a sandwich and a Coke, before shooting his father, Thomas Gilbert Sr., point-blank in the head before trying to stage the murder as a suicide. An NYPD Emergency Services Team arrested him 7 and a half hours after he killed his father. No one believed it was a suicide and Tommy has never said why he did it.
The shocking slaying made front-page headlines for days and was the talk of New York society, which had counted the Gilbert family as respected members for years.
As I researched my book, “Golden Boy,” about the case, I attended many of Tommy’s hearings in Manhattan Supreme Court. There was never any question of whether he had murdered his father just days after his 70th birthday. It was purely a matter of his competency to stand trial.
To be legally competent, a defendant must be able to understand the charges against him as well as courtroom procedure and effectively participate in his own defense. Someone suffering from serious mental-health illness can still be declared fit for trial.
After an exhaustive nine-day competency hearing in the winter of 2015 and several other followup examinations, Tommy was deemed fit for trial and finally faced a jury at Manhattan Supreme Court in May 2019.
Over the years, I got to know Shelley Gilbert, who often complained to reporters about how she and her late husband had been unable to get their son committed for mental treatment. Under the current mental-health system he was able to discharge himself after 72 hours and could not be held any longer.
“It’s bad enough having a mentally ill child on your hands,” Shelley told me. “It’s worse to have an angry mentally ill child.”
Even after his arrest and four long years in Rikers until his eventual trial, Tommy refused to take his medication and received no treatment for his increasingly debilitating condition.
At his trial, Tommy, now deathly pale with a scraggy beard and unruly hair, was almost unrecognizable from his former model-surfer looks. He actively sabotaged his psychiatric defense, addressed the jury on several occasions and once had to be dragged out of court by bailiffs.
In July 2019, Tommy was found guilty of second-degree murder and two weapons charges, rejecting an insanity defense. Two months later, he was sentenced to the maximum of 30 years to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole when he turns 65.
Top attorney Alex Spiro, who represented Tommy for several years but did not defend him at trial, described it as a “human tragedy.”
Unfortunately, no one ever invoked Kendra’s Law, which allows a judge to force a person with a serious mental illness to take medication or undergo supervised inpatient mental treatment. It was passed in New York in 1999 after the death of journalist Kendra Webdale, who was pushed to her death in front of a subway train in Manhattan by a mentally ill man. But the law is little known about and rarely enforced.
“It’s a real shame that when … he wasn’t in the system, there was no way to help him,” Spiro told me. “Because you can’t force an adult, absent extraordinary circumstances, to get treatment. So everybody was helpless.”
John Glatt is the author of “Golden Boy: A Murder Among the Manhattan Elite” (St. Martin’s Press), out now.
