Burned-Alive Murder Victim In NYC Has Ties To Chicago Area
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A Chicago area family is preparing to travel to New York to cope with an unthinkable loss.
Their loved one, 70-year-old Deloris Gillespie, was killed over the weekend, in a crime that made headlines around the world. She was set on fire in an elevator.
"This is surreal. It's just horrific," Tony Gillespie tells CBS 2's Pamela Jones.
He can't seem to escape images of his aunt and the fear and pain she must have faced while burning alive in a Brooklyn elevator.
The 70-year-old was coming home from getting groceries when a man she knew sprayed her head to toe with a flammable liquid and set her on fire.
While firefighters evacuated her building, the woman's son made a frantic call to family in northwest Indiana trying to explain.
"He just kept screaming, 'Mommy is not here. Something happened. Something happened to Mommy,'" Tony Gillespie says.
Police say 47-year-old Jerome Isaac flew off in an angry rage Saturday. He'd done repairs for Gillespie as a handyman and claimed she owed him $2,000.
Surveillance photos show him dressed like an exterminator in protective gloves.
Police say he waited for Gillespie outside the elevator. When the door opened, he was seen methodically dousing her with liquid. Police say he then pulled out a barbeque lighter, lit a rag in a bottle and tossed the flaming bottle at her.
Her body was burned so badly, she wasn't immediately identified.
"Eventually they just narrowed it down to she was the only one in the entire building that they couldn't account for," her nephew says.
The suspect appeared in court Monday. Police say after he left Gillespie's building, he lit his own front door on fire about a block away.
As Tony Gillespie prepares to make a solemn trip to New York to say goodbye, the images of news accounts about his aunt's death haunt him. He wants to remember her as a smiling mother and grandmother.
"I am a God-fearing man, and I know the right thing to do is forgive and I think at some point I'll get there, but not today," he said.
