You hear new parents going on about how they want to give their offspring everything.

Well, they might reconsider after hearing the cautionary tale of Thomas Gilbert Jr.

Thomas Jr. played football at Princeton and graduated with a degree in economics. At the age of 30, he was unemployed and ‘surviving’ on an allowance of $1 000 a week from his parents.

That’s roughly R14 000 a week, or around R56 000 a month. Not bad for someone who isn’t working.

Then daddy, Thomas Sr. (below), did the unthinkable. He cut Junior’s allowance down to $300 a week.

Here’s CNN:

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.

Gilbert’s attorneys did not dispute that he killed his father but said he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Jurors dismissed the insanity defense; they also found him guilty on two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree.

He was found not guilty of criminal possession of forgery devices.

The weekly allowance was cut hours before Jr. snapped and killed his father. He is now facing life in prison, and will be sentenced on August 9.

Via the Daily Beast, here’s more from the day he pulled the trigger:

On January 4, 2015, Thomas Gilbert Jr. unexpectedly arrived at his parents’ posh apartment in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood, just hours after his father had told him that he was slashing his weekly allowance to $300.

He told his mother, Shelley Gilbert, that he needed “to talk business” with his dad, Thomas Gilbert Sr., a founding managing partner at Wainscott Capital, a lucrative New York hedge fund.

He then sent his mother out of the apartment to fetch him a sandwich and a Coke. Gilbert allegedly knew his mom didn’t keep the soda in the apartment, so she would have to go out to get it—leaving him alone with his dad.

When his mother returned, she found the elder Gilbert shot in the head with a gun on his chest. His left hand was on the handle, “as if someone wanted it to appear it was suicide,” Craig Ortner, an assistant district attorney with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, said during the trial.

Surveillance video shows the younger Gilbert, wearing a hoodie and carrying a gym bag, enter and leave his parent’s apartment building within a 15-minute span.

If you’re going to give your kids everything, be careful if you try to take it away.

Training them to expect a certain standard of living could be deadly.

[sources:cnn&dailybeast]