The 8-year-old boy whose unhinged pharmaceutical executive mother allegedly killed him and then attempted suicide in a posh suite at the Peninsula Hotel was “profoundly afflicted” by autism which left him unable to speak, his devastated father said yesterday.
“He could understand what people were saying to him, but he couldn’t speak or write, so he communicated just by pointing,” said Jude Michael Mirra’s biological father, Emil Valentino Tzekov, a California yoga guru.
Tzekov, 42, said he hadn’t heard from his multi-millionaire ex-wife, Gigi Jordan, or their son in about two years, and was stunned to discover that she had been charged with killing the boy.
“I’m in state of shock. This is something I never thought could happen,” he said. “She had no psychological problems. She just had a trough upbringing. Everyone wants to know why she did this. I do too. I’d like to know what happened.”
He and Jordan were married in 2001 after meeting at a gym where he taught yoga in California. Jude Michael was born about a year-and-a-half later and the couple raised the boy in Florida.
“She wanted so much to have a baby. She was a very good mom,” he said.
Although the child’s problems were difficult, Tzekov said he and Jordan doted on the boy.
“He love the computer and watching cartoons, but he needed a great deal of care,” he said.
But by 2006, the marriage was petering out and the pair decided to divorce amicably. Jordan moved with the boy to San Francisco and about a year later, told Tzeov they were moving to the East coast.
“That was the last I had heard from her. I didn’t even know they were in New York,” he said.
Tzekov said reports that Jordan was Belgian were untrue, and that she had been born to “a poor family” in the United States. He said she had struck out on her own at age 16, when her parents divorced and had built a massive pharmaceutical and real estate fortune on her own.
“She became very successful in a very short period of time with no support from anybody,” he said. “She was really independent.”
Cops charged an unhinged pharmaceutical exec with second-degree murder yesterday for allegedly killing her 8-year-old son in a posh Midtown room before a failed suicide bid, officials said.
Jordan, 49, was formally charged with second-degree murder yesterday, but remained hospitalized.
Cops were alerted to her sinister plan claimed, when they received a call from Jordan’s aunt in Belgium saying she had received a rambling email from her niece in which she threatened to kill her son and herself.
Jordan claimed in the email that her son had been sexually molested and was “in constant pain.”
When cops came upon the nightmarish scene in an $1,175-a-night deluxe suite at the Peninsula Hotel Friday morning, they found a handwritten note pointing them to files contained on Jordan’s laptop that she said would shed light on why she did what she did.
Police were still waiting for a search warrant late yesterday to access the files, sources said.
Additional reporting by Murray Weiss and Larry Celona