Thomas Gilbert Jr., 34, is on trial for the 2015 murder of his father. Photo / Jefferson Siegel, The New York Times
Thomas Gilbert Jr. repeatedly interrupted testimony from his mother, who said he had been mentally ill for years before his father's murder.
In summer 2009, Thomas Gilbert Jr. cut a handsome figure in his Princeton graduation gown as he posed for a photograph with his mother, sister and father — a hedge fund founder well-known in wealthy Manhattan circles.
This week, Gilbert, 34, was hunched over the defence table in a Manhattan courtroom, a shadow of the strapping blond surfer he once was, with unkempt beard and hair, rocking in his chair and staring downward.
He yelled "Objection!" repeatedly as his mother took the witness stand to describe his slow mental unravelling in the years before prosecutors say he killed his father.
Prosecutors have said they will prove Gilbert showed up unannounced at his parents' Turtle Bay, Manhattan, apartment in January 2015 with a pistol and shot his father in the head after learning his parents were drastically cutting his $1,000-a-week allowance. The murder rattled the New York society milieu his family frequented.
Gilbert's lawyer, Arnold Levine, argues his client was too impaired by mental illness to understand his actions, and the trial unfolding in state Supreme Court in Manhattan has centred on Gilbert's sanity.
As Gilbert continued to shout objections and spout incomprehensible legalese Wednesday, Levine asked the judge to stop the trial and order a new mental health evaluation.
"His objections have no basis in law," Levine said. "He is affirmatively undermining and sabotaging my ability to defend him."
But Justice Melissa Jackson, who previously found Gilbert competent to stand trial, denied the request. "Your client perfectly understands," she said.
She then chastised Gilbert for his outbursts, explained "they were disruptive to the jury" and threatened to remove him from court if he did not stop.
Though Gilbert's histrionics may support the defence theory that he is unhinged, under state law a person can be found competent to stand trial even if they have some symptoms of mental illness, so long as a judge determines — usually based on the testimony of psychiatrists — that he or she understands the charges and the court proceedings.
James Cohen, an associate professor at law with Fordham University, said it is rare for a defendant to remain delusional over an extended period of time, once given medication.
"You have to be really ill with a mental illness that is very difficult for medication to shake," he said.
The legal standard for an insanity defence — which Levine is expected to present — is so difficult to meet that few defendants who use one prevail at trial, even when they have a documented history of psychosis. In New York, defendants must prove not just that they have a mental illness, but that the illness prevented them from understanding the consequences of their actions or that what they did was wrong.
Prosecutors typically argue that the insanity claim is a ruse invented after the crime. They tend to focus on evidence that the accused person planned the killing or tried to evade capture to show he or she knew their actions were wrong.
"The defendant was fully aware of what he was doing," Craig Ortner, an assistant district attorney, said during opening statements. "The evidence will show without a reasonable doubt that the defendant killed his father in cold blood."
On Wednesday, Gilbert became upset and started objecting when his mother, Shelley Gilbert, mentioned camping trips he had taken as a teenager with his father.
Earlier in the hearing, Gilbert tried to argue that he has the constitutional right to speak his mind during the trial proceedings.
"Your honor judge, the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech in the courtroom, fair-cross examination," he said. "The evidence in this case specifically, all the evidence being used, is suppression of the Fourth Amendment."
He also asked for a "court-appointed defence."
"He is not assisting his lawyer," Levine said, exasperated. "He's actually working against his lawyer."
For a day and a half, Shelley Gilbert recounted their family's seemingly picture-perfect life when her children were young, and then told how her son's mental state deteriorated as he reached adulthood.
"We were a very happy family," she said, mustering a smile in otherwise agonising testimony. "We hung out and had a good time."
Thomas Gilbert thrived as the child of privilege, she said. He enjoyed taking Chinese language classes and calculus and played football, basketball and baseball while he attended the Buckley School on the Upper East Side and later Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.
Shelley Gilbert said her son and husband enjoyed a loving relationship for years. She recalled how Tommy, at 10, gave his father a trophy that read "Best Dad in the World." They shared a love of sports, she said, and bonded on his school camping trips in New England.
"Sometimes they came home brown from all the mud," she said. "It was the highlight of the year."
But their relationship took a dark turn during her son's late high school years. Her son's temper was revealed when, rejecting his father's suggestion, he said he did not want to play soccer anymore, she said. "He didn't like to be controlled," Shelley Gilbert said.
Later, her teenage son developed a fear of "contamination," she said. He would get rid of clothing and sometimes furniture for fear items had been contaminated by an unknown source. This fear later extended to people around him.
"He was afraid his roommate became contaminated," she said. "He had no control over it, what was contaminated."
In 2003, Thomas Gilbert enrolled at Princeton, his father's alma mater, but stayed only one semester before his "contamination" fears returned, she testified. He began washing his hands obsessively and avoiding certain places he felt were unclean, including Kennedy Airport.
Under questioning by Ortner, Shelley Gilbert acknowledged her son had began taking drugs, including marijuana, cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms.
"He was self-medicating," she said.
She said she felt optimistic when her son took a break from Princeton during his first year to surf in South Carolina. But then she learned he had been admitted to a hospital in Charleston after not sleeping for three days.
Over the ensuing years she said the family tried several times to convince him to seek treatment at a psychiatric hospital. But he refused each time, even when they arranged a stay at a hospital in New England, she recalled.
"His mind was not functioning right," she said. "Greater anger, greater distance from us. He did not want us to email, text or call. If we would, he would ignore it.
"It was very frustrating," she added. "When we made efforts, he would shut us down."
Shelley Gilbert said her son eventually earned an economics degree in 2009, despite his illness. But he failed to get a steady job when he returned to New York, and she and her husband had no choice but to support him financially, she said.
She also testified that years later she had agreed with her husband to cut her son's allowance in an effort to force him to get psychiatric help.
"I thought, maybe it'll help," she said. "I wasn't in favor particularly, but we had to try something."
Written by: Edgar Sandoval
Photographs by: Jefferson Siegel
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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