In Queens, the convicted ‘Ivy League Killer,’ 35 year old Jason Bohn, cried his way through sentencing when Judge Michael Aloise gave him the maximum of life behind bars with no chance of parole. Bohn beat his live-in girlfriend, Weight Watchers Executive Danielle Thomas to death when he believed that she would call another man. Even though he never cried in court over the 90-minute torturous attack, which Thomas begged for her life, he cried so hard during sentencing in Queens, New York, that his nose started to bleed.
He turned on the waterworks while trying to apologize to Thomas’ family and promising to reach out to domestic violence victims. “I’ll never forgive myself for what I did and not getting help for my emotional and psychological issues,” Bohn told the court. “I hurt my closest friends and family.” Jaime Thomas-Bright, Danielle’s heartbroken mom, didn’t take his words lightly. “Life will never be good for me ever again,” Bright said. “I’ll never get to be a grandmother and, Judge Aloise, I think I would have been a great grandma. I dread getting old.” She went on to say that she remembers just three weeks before she was tortured and killed, how her daughter was still starry-eyed about the prospect of getting married. “I once asked Danielle three weeks before you killed her if you’d propose what she’d say,” Jaime Thomas-Bright told Bohn. “And she smiled and said ‘yes.’
Juanita Hardgrove, Thomas’s grandmother, recalled the minute she found out her granddaughter was dead. “I’m a cancer survivor, and I thought that hearing I had cancer would be the worse news until I got that call that you murdered my precious Dani,” Hardgrove said. “Only a bully and a coward would do this to such a beautiful woman.” Bohn cried as Thomas’s grandmother spoke, he even called the victim’s mother “Mom” and grandmother “Nana.” “It was helpful to me that Jason spoke today,” Thomas-Bright said. “I didn’t think he was going to, but when he said he was sorry and turned around and looked at me and Nana and called me Mom, I thought, he normally calls me Jamie, so when he called me Mom that touched me.”
All the emotion had zero effect on the forewoman of the jury that only after a few hours of deliberation, found him guilty. “That was weird,” said juror Elena Rodriguez, who made a point to attend the sentencing. “It was condescending and possibly a tactic for him to get the judge to see that they were closer than everybody thought they were, but that didn’t work.” It wasn’t his first attempt a sympathy bid. “I pondered suicide in an attempt to alleviate everyone’s pain,” Bohn said. According to sources, about two months ago the Columbia University School of Law graduate, tried to slit his wrists in his jail cell, tried to hang himself and drank a poisonous liquid in attempts to end his life.
Image Credit: Ellis Kaplan