Millionaire Gigi Jordan on trial for killing autistic son in New York
A multimillionaire mother killed her autistic eight-year-old son by forcing painkillers and other drugs down his throat with a syringe in a luxury Manhattan hotel room, a prosecutor said as her murder trial opened.
A multimillionaire mother killed her autistic eight-year-old son by forcing painkillers and other drugs down his throat with a syringe in a luxury Manhattan hotel room, a prosecutor said as her murder trial opened.
Prosecutors on Wednesday portrayed Gigi Jordan as a calculating killer who poisoned her only child and then transferred money out of his trust fund as he lay dead. Her defence says the pharmaceuticals entrepreneur was driven by fear and desperation to kill the boy and try to kill herself.
Jordan, 54, sat at the defence table as jurors heard the beginning of competing versions of a story her lawyers say she yearns to tell. Her son, Jude Mirra, was found dead of a drug overdose and Jordan was found incoherent in a US$2,300-a-night suite strewn with over 5,800 prescription pills in February 2010.
Jordan plans to testify to explain "the tragedy of their collective life": a boy with a mysterious medical condition, and a mother who scoured the country for treatment for him but came to feel their safety was at risk and murder-suicide the only solution, defence attorney Allan Brenner said.
She believed that her life was in danger because of a financial conflict, and that without her, Jude would be vulnerable to a man she says abused him, her lawyers say. But no abuse charges have been filed.
"She brought him the peace she couldn't bring him during his life. She kept him from the animals she couldn't keep from his door before then," he said. "So she sits, forever broken-hearted."