Kin of Woman Torched in Elevator Calls Plea Deal 'Profound Disappointment'

The niece of the woman who was doused with gasoline and set on fire in an elevator called the sentence of 50 years to life behind bars for her murderer a "profound disappointment." 

Jerome Isaac, 48, pled guilty to a first-degree murder charge for killing 73-year-old Deloris Gillespie, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes announced Wednesday.

"Fifty years doesn't seem the punishment fitting the crime," Tracy Robinson said via e-mail the plea deal was struck last month. 

"It doesn't feel just," she added.

Gillespie’s murder, in December of 2011, was caught on video on the elevator’s security camera. In the footage, Isaac, dressed as an exterminator, is seen dousing the woman’s body with gasoline, before he lights her on fire and throws a Molotov cocktail into the elevator.

Isaac said that Gillespie owed him $2,100 for five months worth of cleaning work done in her apartment.

Robinson said the plea deal has renewed her anguish over the "blatant, cruel, and horrific" method of the murder.

"It can't be undone! Nothing done to him will bring her back; or relieve any of us of the awful thoughts we have imagining her suffering.  It is all too terrible to contemplate," she wrote.  

But, she said, as a "woman of faith," she said she believes that "even this is in God's hands."

"While my authentic feeling is anger, sadness and profound disappointment. I believe you fight fire with water ... Not fire. So, may God have mercy on his soul," she said.

Shelia Hillsman, Gillespie's daughter, also would have liked to see a stiffer sentence. 

“I'm satisfied with that because he shouldn't be out in the streets again," she told the Daily News when the deal was reached last month. 

But, she added, "it's too bad that New York doesn't have the death penalty because I believe they should do to him exactly what he did to my mother."

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