Jason Bohn

BA, Columbia University MA, Columbia University

Most Ivy League monsters are accustomed to doing whatever they want with few negative consequences—that’s why you go to an Ivy League school, after all. What’s the point of sitting through those lectures and reading those texts and writing those papers and taking those exams if you can’t sanction the secret bombing of an entire country or get rich watching the US economy have a heart attack? Still, occasionally one golden Ivy grad will cross a line. It might be the line marked “Don’t kick, stomp, and torture people,” and then—who knows why? life can be so unfair—society will be obligated to retaliate.

After earning a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Columbia, Jason Bohn went on to law school at the University of Florida. There he met and fell in love with a smart, beautiful Kentucky native, Danielle Thomas, who was working on her MBA. She apparently loved him in return. They were an ambitious couple, and after receiving their degrees they moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens. Both appeared to be on the fast track to New York fabulosity—she with a job as a financial analyst at Weight Watchers, he as a contract attorney for Goldman Sachs, Google, AOL, and other companies.

Unfortunately, Ms. Thomas soon learned that despite his impressive credentials, her boyfriend was prone to fits of uncontrollable rage—so uncontrollable that in early June 2012 she was forced to flee to a battered women’s shelter. She obtained a restraining order to keep Bohn away, but later that month, for reasons known only to her, she found herself back in the apartment with him. There he kicked, stomped, and tortured her for an hour and a half before strangling her to death.

The tabloids ridiculed the only argument his lawyer put forth at the trial: as a child Bohn had been abandoned by his mother, which led to the extreme mental condition that caused him to kill the woman he loved. The jury didn’t buy it, either. To quote the New York Daily News of March 5, 2014:

A loathsome law school grad was convicted Wednesday of beating and choking his girlfriend to death in a horrific attack.… Jason Bohn, 35, was found guilty of first-degree murder for snuffing the life out of Danielle Thomas, 27, inside their Astoria, Queens, apartment in June 2012.

Over to the New York Post for Bohn’s punishment:

Convicted Ivy League killer Jason Bohn blubbered his way through a sentencing in Queens… where a judge hit him with a maximum of life behind bars with no chance for parole.

This may have been the only occasion in the history of the world in which an account of torture and murder included the word “blubbered.” Then again, it’s the New York Post, so maybe they do that all the time. Even in sports articles.

In any case, Bohn’s new roommates for life will no doubt enjoy this detail from the UK’s Daily Mail:

Though he never shed a tear in court over the merciless 90-minute torture attack during which the helpless victim begged for her life, Bohn bawled so hard during Judge Michael Aloise’s sentencing that Bohn’s nose started to bleed.

Poor baby.