The mom of the Ivy League grad accused of killing his father over a cut in his allowance testified in heart-wrenching detail Tuesday about how she discovered her husband’s body.
“I remember calling his name and hoping he was just knocked out and not dead,” Shelley Gilbert said in Manhattan Supreme Court of her spouse, millionaire hedge fund manager Thomas Gilbert Sr.
“The closer I got, I thought, ‘Tommy was far sicker than we ever really knew,’ ” she added of the couple’s accused killer son, Thomas Jr.
Shelley Gilbert added that she could see the bullet hole behind the ear of her husband, who had just turned 70.
A few minutes earlier that day in early January 2015, the Gilberts’ then-30-year-old son had shown up unannounced at their tony Beekman Place pad and asked his mom to go out and fetch him a sandwich and Coke.
She returned 5 minutes later to make the grisly find — her husband in a pool of blood, pieces of brain matter oozing out, prosecutors said.
Shelley dialed 911, and prosecutors played the chilling call for the jury.
When a female operator asked the woman who shot her husband, Shelley Gilbert, clearly in shock, replied in a matter-of-fact tone, “My son.
“He’s nuts, but I didn’t know he was this nuts.
“He shot him in the head.”
The mother is the prosecution’s reluctant star witness, testifying only after she was subpoenaed.
Assistant DA Craig Ortner frequently grew frustrated when Shelley Gilbert forgot details she had told the grand jury four years earlier and confronted her with her prior testimony.
The shattered mom said, “A coping mechanism for all this is to look forward and not backward, so I have been very focused on looking forward, and I usually forget things.”
During her testimony, her gaunt, pale son blurted out “objection” at least two dozen times.
The outburst prompted Justice Melissa Jackson to threaten to boot him from the courtroom if he couldn’t control himself.
The only time Gilbert Jr. stared directly at his mother was when she described her surfer-loving son’s once-striking good looks and strapping figure, which have markedly diminished since his 2015 arrest.
Shelley described how she and her husband bankrolled her son’s extravagant lifestyle.
They paid his membership dues at the exclusive Upper East Side River Club and the East Hampton’s Maidstone Club. They footed the bill for his Chelsea apartment, his Jeep, his parking tickets and his jaunts around the world.
The younger Gilbert had every social and economic advantage, attending the Buckley School and Deerfield Academy before landing at Princeton University.
He summered at the family’s $10 million Hamptons home and was a fixture at society galas.
But Shelley said that under this facade of privilege, her son was suffering from severe mental illness. He had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
She said he’d grown increasingly withdrawn and paranoid, complaining that his parents’ house was “contaminated” and refusing to visit.
Shelley said she and her husband desperately wanted to get him committed to a psychiatric hospital but didn’t know how.In the months before the murder, they repeatedly reduced his $1,000-a-week allowance. The last cut — from $400 to $300 a week — was the final straw, prosecutors said.
Ortner said it was this fateful decision that spurred Gilbert’s rage, and the defendant was driven by greed and resentment when he pressed his .40-cailber Glock against his dad’s head and pulled the trigger.
Gilbert had painstakingly planned the crime, driving to Ohio to illegally buy the gun and visiting the websites hireakiller.com and hitman.com, the prosecutor said.
“When he murdered his father, the defendant was fully aware of what he was doing, and he certainly knew that it was wrong,” Ortner told the jury, as a disheveled Gilbert, wearing a wrinkled white T-shirt, stared down at the defense table, rocking softly.
Gilbert’s lawyer, Arnold Levine, said it was his client’s spiraling mental illness that led to the murder of his millionaire hedge funder father, not avarice.
Gilbert faces up to life in prison on murder, gun possession and other charges.