Princeton grad found guilty of killing his father after his weekly allowance was cut

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Once part of Manhattan's social elite, a 30-year-old Princeton graduate lived off his parents, prosecutors say, spending his time surfing in the Hamptons until he killed his father over a cut to his weekly allowance.

Thomas Gilbert Jr. was found guilty Friday of murder in the second degree. Thomas Gilbert Sr., a founding managing partner of the hedge fund Wainscott Capital, was found dead in his apartment in January 2015 with a gunshot wound to the head. "It wasn't until the dad started cutting off his money that the defendant decided to kill him," said Craig Ortner, an assistant district attorney with the Manhattan district attorney's office. "Literally hours before he was killed, (his father) further cut his allowance to $300."

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Tommy, as he is known to family and friends, is being held at the Rikers Island prison. Gilbert is a former Princeton football player who graduated with a degree in economics. At the time of the shooting in January 2015, he was 30 and unemployed, and had been receiving up to $1,000 a week from his parents.

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But, Defense attorney Arnold Levine said, Gilbert "deteriorated" around the time he began to attend Princeton. "Nobody wanted to look at him -- that background, those looks, that schooling -- and say he could be mentally ill," Levine said. "Nobody wanted to think it." His former therapist, Susan Evans, testified that she saw him for several years before the shooting and that his preoccupation with paranoid thoughts was "interfering" with his ability to function.

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Emails between Gilbert and his parents that were shown in court depict a tumultuous relationship. He repeatedly asked for money, sometimes "for a charity thing," sometimes forwarding past-due bills from an exclusive athletic and social club for thousands of dollars to his mother. In October 2013, Gilbert emailed his father, asking him for space. "The more you respect my space, the more I will appreciate you!" he wrote.

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In November 2014, prosecutors say, his computer showed 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 would be reduced from $800 to $600. The day of his death, he changed his regular deposit into his son's account to $300, bank records showed.

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The killing

On Jan. 4, 2015, Shelley Gilbert found her husband on their bedroom floor in their Manhattan apartment with a gunshot wound to his head and a gun on his chest. Minutes before, Gilbert had come in 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 client was clinically insane during the shooting. But prosecutors and their medical experts say he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Prosecutors point to surveillance footage that shows Gilbert, wearing a hoodie and carrying a gym bag, entering his family's posh apartment building just after 3 p.m. and leaving less than 15 minutes later.

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In New York, a defendant must prove their inability to distinguish right from wrong in order to win an insanity plea defense.

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When an emergency dispatcher asked who shot her husband, she replied, "My son, who is nuts, but I didn't know he was this nuts."

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