Orlando police recover diamond earrings worth $7,69,500 stolen by Florida jail employee

"Am I going to be charged with what's in my stomach?" Jaythan Gilder asked a Florida jail employee on February 26.

The answer, apparently, was yes.

The next day, the authorities charged Gilder, 32, with first-degree grand theft and third-degree robbery with a mask. They say that he had stolen two pairs of diamond earrings worth a total of $7,69,500 from Tiffany & Co. in Orlando -- then swallowed them hours later as the police were about to arrest him.

On Friday, the Orlando Police Department announced that it had recovered the earrings from Gilder, who spent more than 12 days in a hospital, when they were "expelled from his system."

The police said that on February 26, Gilder of Houston, using the alias "Shawn" and posing as a representative for an NBA player with the Orlando Magic, was escorted into a private room in the back of a Tiffany & Co. store in an Orlando mall.

There, he viewed two pairs of diamond earrings, valued at $769,500, and a diamond ring, worth $5,87,000, according to court records. Gilder was looking at the jewelry when he suddenly jumped up and grabbed it, according to the arrest warrant filed by an Orlando police officer.

Gilder rushed toward the door, pushing and pulling at the handle as he tried to leave, the warrant said. But as he struggled to get out, an employee pulled the ring from him. Gilder was able to flee with the earrings, the warrant said.

Using security cameras and license plate reader technology, police were able to identify the car that Gilder had driven out of the mall. Later that night, he was pulled over for a traffic violation about 100 miles west of Tallahassee.

As Gilder, who had 48 separate failure-to-appear violations from Colorado, was being taken into custody, he sneakily "swallowed several items," the arrest warrant said.

When he was transferred to a jail in Washington County, Florida, several "foreign objects," believed to be the diamond earrings, showed up on an X-ray image, authorities said.

That's when he asked a staff member at the jail about whether he would be charged with what was in his stomach.

After the earrings that Gilder swallowed were recovered, authorities took them back to Tiffany & Co., where they were cleaned and inspected, the police said. The serial numbers on the jewelry matched the numbers on the missing earrings.

Contact information for Gilder was not available Friday. It was not clear from court records whether he had a lawyer. The Tiffany & Co. store in Orlando did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

After a review of Gilder's records, police said that he had been charged "with a nearly identical robbery/theft" from a Tiffany & Co. in Texas.

As to whether one can be charged for stolen property that one ingests, Gilder appeared to answer his own question just after his arrest.

According to the authorities, one of the arresting officers overheard him saying, "I should have thrown them out the window."