A Manhattan mom will have to testify against her young daughter’s alleged groper — a second time — after the dangerous convicted pedophile backed out of a plea deal today.
“That’s bad news,” the mom, Justine Manser, said upon learning that registered sex offender Timothy Gillette, 62, had changed his mind about a five-year prison deal and now wants to fight his sexual abuse and child endangerment case.
Manser had been walking with her 10-year-old daughter and her seven-year-old son down Third Avenue near East 20th St. back in mid-May when a stranger cops say is Gillette sauntered past.
“Mommy! That man touched me!” the girl suddenly cried out, demonstrating what the man had done. “She put her hand on her crotch and ran it up her body,” the mom explained.
The intrepid mother leapt to action, following the stranger, snapping his picture with a cell phone, and rushing it to cops — who tracked Gillette down in less than a hour.
Prosecutors immediately convened a grand jury, before which the mom testified live, and her daughter testified via video. But once Gillette agreed to the plea deal the DA halted the proceeding before the grand jury voted.
“We thought this was taken care of — this might upset her now that it’s not,” Manser said, referring to her daughter.
“He just seemed to not care that I was right next to him,” the mom recalled of the attack. “That seems to me to show that he’s very dangerous.”
Gillette’s lawyer, Richard Charney, did not explain his client’s decision not to plea. Prosecutors have until July 11 to reconvene a grand jury and get a vote. Manser said she is happy to testify again, but hoped that her daughter would not have to repeat her videotape testimony.
Gillette remains held in lieu of $50,000 bail, and is no stranger to jail. He was arrested in 1984 for sex assaults on two girls, ages 7 and 9, taking a plea to two counts of first-degree attempted rape and getting released from prison in May, 1992, authorities told The Post.