The plan was never going to work, but you have to respect the commitment. A Florida man robbed a Tiffany & Co. store, swallowed the evidence, two pairs of diamond earrings worth $769,500, and this week a jury convicted him anyway.
It happened in February 2025 at the Mall at Millenia in Orlando. Prosecutors say Jaythan Gilder walked in posing as a man negotiating a jewelry buy for an Orlando Magic player, got taken to a private room, and was shown the heavy stuff: an 8.19-carat pair at $609,500, a 4.86-carat pair at $160,000, and a ring worth $587,000. He grabbed the two pairs of earrings and bolted. An employee got the ring slapped out of his hand and was hurt in the scuffle, but Gilder got out with the earrings.
Florida Highway Patrol caught up with him on I-10 in Washington County, a stop that started over dead taillights. As troopers took him into custody, Gilder swallowed the earrings. A body scan at the county jail showed them sitting in his stomach, and according to the arrest report he asked the jail staff the only question that mattered to him: “Am I going to be charged with what’s in my stomach?” A trooper also heard him say he should have thrown them out the window.
Police then did the only thing they could do. They waited. The earrings came out the natural way after roughly two weeks, the serial numbers matched the stolen pairs, and Tiffany & Co. took them back and cleaned them. Police said Gilder also had 48 warrants out of Colorado and a similar Tiffany robbery on his record from Texas in 2022.
On Thursday, State Attorney Monique Worrell announced the jury found him guilty of robbery and grand theft. Sentencing comes later. The earrings, for the record, survived the whole trip.
