The 67-year-old man who leaped to his death inside Denver’s Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse last week was on trial for attempted murder.
Thomas Stilson jumped from an upper floor of the courthouse just after 8 a.m. on Aug. 1. He injured two other people in the fall; they suffered only minor injuries. The Denver Office of Medical Examiner announced Thursday that it had ruled his death a suicide.
Stilson was the defendant in an ongoing jury trial in which he faced several felony charges — including attempted first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon, menacing and various sentence enhancers that could have led to decades in prison had he been convicted, according to a criminal history report from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Stilson’s attorney, Charles Greenwood, said his client was wrongfully accused. After Stilson died, seven of 12 jurors told the judge on the case that they would have voted to acquit him, Greenwood said. He does not see Stilson’s death as an admission of guilt.
“I see it as an indictment of the district attorney who treated him inhumanely, and of a system that treats so many similarly,” Greenwood said. “(Prosecutors) heinously overcharged him for something that was so obviously unprovable and continued the farce all the way through trial without expressing any remorse or regret for the effect it had on Tom.”
Matt Jablow, spokesman for the Denver District Attorney’s Office, defended prosecutors’ actions in a statement Thursday and called Stilson’s death a tragedy.
“We firmly believe that the charges we filed against him were entirely appropriate,” Jablow said. “Our prosecutors are duty-bound to bring charges only if we believe we can prove a defendant’s guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and that is exactly what we believed in Mr. Stilson’s case.”
Stilson was charged in November. Further details of the allegations against him were not available Thursday because the court case was sealed — made secret — and blocked from public view. Greenwood declined to discuss the specifics of the case.
He said Stilson was a “kind, reflective, witty person.”
“Most people severely underestimate the stress someone feels from being wrongly accused, and the process of vindicating themselves is far longer and more arduous and with more pitfalls and ups and downs, emotionally and legally, than most people realize,” Greenwood said. “The stress of it can be overwhelming to even the best of us.”
Other still-public court records show Stilson pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in Larimer County in 2012 — a low-level misdemeanor offense — and otherwise did not have a criminal history in Colorado beyond minor traffic offenses.
“He really was a good guy,” Greenwood said. “And this is so unbelievably tragic. There is absolutely no silver lining.”
Stilson’s death is at least the second time a defendant in an ongoing jury trial has died by suicide in Denver in recent years. In 2021, a former Lakewood police officer, Randall Butler, 39, killed himself while on trial over allegations he sexually assaulted a woman in the back of his patrol car.
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Originally Published: August 8, 2024 at 3:34 p.m.
