JUNE 19–Police dashcam video captured officers struggling with a convicted jewel thief in an attempt to keep the man from swallowing stolen Tiffany & Co. diamonds worth $770,000.
The footage from a Florida Highway Patrol vehicle was recorded during the February 26 apprehension of Jaythan Gilder, 32, on Interstate 10 in Chipley, a Florida city about 330 miles from Orlando.
Gilder, driving a rented Mitsubishi Outlander, was pulled over by troopers who had received a “be on the lookout” alert from Orlando cops investigating the robbery earlier that day of a Tiffany & Co. store in The Mall of Millenia.
Gilder, whose rap sheet contains a litany of jewelry robberies, was suspected of posing as a representative of an NBA player interested in purchasing diamonds. After being 
shown to a private room, the man grabbed two sets of diamond earrings (worth $609,500 and $160,000) and bolted from the store.
After being pulled from his vehicle and handcuffed, Gilder (seen at right) was being walked to a squad car when a trooper noticed that the detainee “was talking with a closed mouth and was moving an object around…using his tongue.”
As seen on the arrest video–which was released to TSG in response to an open records request–troopers repeatedly ordered Gilder to open his mouth and spit out what was inside.
“You’re about to get tased,” one trooper warned, while another declared, “He swallowed something.” As troopers grabbed his throat and jaw, Gilder–through gritted teeth–replied, “I don’t have to” when told to open his mouth.
Police initially thought Gilder may have been swallowing illegal narcotics, noting that he had white matter on his lip. Gilder said it was Abreva, a cold sore cream. A field test did not detect any illegal substances.
When a search of Gilder’s vehicle only turned up Tiffany & Co. price tags and “earring cards” for the stolen jewelry, a trooper concluded, “He probably did swallow the earrings.” One investigator wondered whether the diamonds could “perforate” something internally and result in surgery.
Following his arrest, Gilder was transported to a local hospital, where he “refused treatment and evaluation while stating many times that he did not want his stomach to be X-Rayed,” according to a police report. After a subsequent jail scan (below left) 
detected “foreign objects” inside his body, Gilder reportedly asked corrections officers, “Am I going to be charged with what’s in my stomach?”
While subsequently hospitalized under guard in Orlando, Gilder “first refused to take any laxatives and claimed to be a practicing Muslim who would only eat after sundown and before sunrise due to it being the holiday of Ramadan, which slowed recovery efforts,” cops reported.
After two weeks, Gilder passed the Tiffany & Co. gems in mid-March. The items were cleaned by “Tiffany’s Master Jeweler” and eventually turned over to a company security manager, according to a police report. Having spent time in a felon’s stomach (and elsewhere), the diamonds are presumably back on the market, if they have not sold already.
While cops waited for him to pass the stolen goods, Gilder “denied there being any jewelry” in his body, claiming that “the only way there would be metals in his system would be because they had accumulated over some time by eating foods with particles of metal in them.”
Remarkably, in addition to ingesting the Tiffany & Co. gems, Gilder had apparently twice previously swallowed earrings.
In February 2022, he was arrested for snatching diamonds from a Colorado jeweler (as he fled, Gilder was shot in the back by the store’s owner). Gilder was later collared after walking into a hospital bleeding from the gunshot wound.
While under guard at the hospital, cops told Gilder “they would be collecting his earrings as evidence,” a Colorado Springs Police Department report states. “He then put them in his mouth and swallowed them.” Cops subsequently searched Gilder’s excrement but did not recover the jewelry “he had previously swallowed when police officers attempted to retrieve them as evidence.”
A police lieutenant reported that “Gilder had also been scanned three times and the earrings were not located inside his body.”
Three years later, as Orlando cops waited for Gilder to expel the stolen Tiffany & Co. merchandise, “two earrings…finally passed through his digestive system.” But the jewelry 
found in his excrement on March 10 “were not the earrings from Tiffany & Co. and are currently being investigated of their origin.”
The recovered earrings (pictured at right) were not of much value and probably untraceable.
Gilder subsequently passed three of the Tiffany earrings later in the day on March 10, and the remaining diamond earring on March 12.
Locked up without bail, Gilder faces robbery and grand theft charges–and a daunting array of evidence–in Florida. He also is wanted in Colorado on multiple felony charges filed in connection with the 2022 Colorado Springs heist (he fled the jurisdiction after posting bond).
Last week, a Florida judge denied two separate motions seeking Gilder’s release from custody so that he could attend his mother’s June 20 funeral in Texas. Sara Goodin, Gilder’s lawyer, stated that her client “has a PTSD and depression diagnosis” and was “desperate to grieve with his family.”
The defense motions were opposed by prosecutors who branded Gilder a “habitual felony offender” and flight risk. While in custody following his 2022 Colorado arrest, Gilder somehow slipped his handcuffs and climbed up into the drop ceiling of his hospital room in an unsuccessful escape attempt. Gilder “was eventually returned to custody in this room after causing extensive damage to the drop-ceiling,” cops reported.
In seeking a bail reduction, Goodin claimed that Gilder “has a limited criminal history,” an assertion contradicted by a rap sheet that spans 20 years, many states, and which includes convictions for resisting arrest, assault, narcotics possession, and multiple jewelry thefts. (9 pages)
