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Keith Gibson, Freed by a Delaware Judge in April, Linked to at Least Six Killings

Arrested after a Wilmington robbery, he faced a murder warrant in a Philadelphia Dunkin' manager's death as records showed how he left a Delaware court weeks earlier.

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Illustration: a rowhouse street at dusk with a patrol car in the distance

Weeks before the killings, a Delaware judge had Keith Gibson in her courtroom and let him go. By Friday, June 11, 2021, police in Philadelphia and Delaware had linked the 39-year-old to at least six killings that year, and court and corrections records reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer showed how close the system had come to keeping him locked up.

Gibson was arrested on Tuesday, June 8, in Wilmington, about a block from a Rite Aid that police said he had just robbed. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. He was charged with robbery and related offenses and held in Delaware on $300,000 bail.

By Wednesday the case had grown. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner approved murder charges against Gibson in the death of Christine Lugo, 40, the manager of the Dunkin' at 532 West Lehigh Avenue in Fairhill, who was shot dead in a robbery on Saturday, June 5. Surveillance video from that killing, together with the Wilmington arrest, turned one homicide into an investigation spanning two states. "Now we have a firearm recovered," Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said. "We do have some ballistic evidence, obviously, with the bullet that hit his mom. So, we're looking to see if we can link them in that way."

His mother was Christine Gibson, a 54-year-old mental-health counselor. She was found shot to death at her workplace in Philadelphia on February 8. The next day, Philadelphia homicide detectives called her son's Delaware probation officer and identified him as a suspect, the officer wrote in court records. Vanore said investigators had come up with nothing solid enough to arrest him for her death.

What they had was a probation violation. Gibson had spent more than a decade in prison for manslaughter after the 2008 robbery and fatal shooting of a man in Wilmington, and was paroled in June 2020. After another violation, for fighting, he was released again in December, forbidden to leave Delaware. Being in Philadelphia was enough. He was arrested there and sent back to Delaware in late March. His probation officer described a "very extensive history of violence," recommended six and a half years in prison, and wrote that, by early reports, Christine Gibson had told friends and family that if anything happened to her, her son would be the one responsible.

Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla found him in violation on April 13 and put off sentencing. On April 27 his public defender told her he had community support and job prospects. Probation officers did not object, a spokesperson for the state's corrections department said, and the judge sentenced Gibson to 30 days with credit for time served. He walked out that day.

Investigators believe the killing began again within weeks. Leslie Lizet Basilio, 28, was shot dead in a robbery at a MetroPCS store in Elsmere, Delaware, on May 15, three days after Gibson checked in with parole officers in Philadelphia; Vanore said investigators there believed Gibson may have been the gunman. Detectives also linked him to the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery in Delaware early on Sunday, June 6, and to two more robberies there that week. And he was a suspect in a January double homicide in which two men were found dead in the back of the Al-Madinah Traders store in North Philadelphia.

What the record does and does not say. On June 11, 2021, Gibson was charged with robbery in Delaware, and a warrant had been approved charging him with murder in Christine Lugo's death. He had not been charged in any of the other killings described here; those links came from investigators. Police first gave Christine Lugo's age as 41; her mother and her children gave it as 40. The account of the April hearings and his release comes from Delaware court and corrections records as reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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