Plea deal freed him from jail. Days later, he was charged in brutal Miami Beach murder

Gregory Fitzgerald Gibert was only out of jail for six days when police say he beat a transgender woman to death with a pipe as she slept next to a ballet auditorium on Miami Beach.

The murder suspect had spent most of the past year behind bars awaiting trial on aggravated assault and attempted robbery charges for a failed early morning attempt to steal a Moped in Miami’s nightclub district. No one was injured in that April 2023 incident but Gibert had been charged in a string of previous crimes, some of them violent, and after the arrest the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office tagged him a habitual violent offender.

During the botched Moped theft, according to police and eye witnesses, Gibert was holding a metal object when he went up to a man outside Club E11EVEN and told him to get off his scooter. When Gibert was unable to start the vehicle, police say, he got off, yelled at the guy, threw some rocks at him and walked away. Police found him a few minutes later. He remained in jail until two weeks ago.

Despite the habitual violent offender tag, Gibert was released on April 15 after the prosecution’s main witness failed to show up for a deposition three different times.

Before a deal was worked between the sides in front of Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Andrea Wolfson, the state argued that Gibert should spend more than a year in prison, followed by four years of probation. His public defender, attempting to keep Gibert out of prison, asked for less than a year, with one year’s probation.

Wolfson sided with the state, but knocked off additional prison time — ruling Gibert’s year in jail should count as time served.

Less than a week later, Andrea Doria Dos Passos, 37, was dead, her body allegedly bludgeoned by Gibert, 53. The murder was so gruesome, according to Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Mindy Glazer, that she took the rare move of upping the charge against Gibert during his first appearance in court, from second-degree, to first-degree murder.

Ultimately, a grand jury will determine if there is enough probable cause to indict him on that charge.

After the scooter arrest, the state attorney’s career criminal unit decided to tag him a habitual violent offender, citing Gibert’s lengthy criminal history that included violent crimes in Florida dating back decades. The unit determined that Gibert met enough requirements in a state statute for the courts to ignore most maximum minimum sentence requirements and increase penalties on some of his charges. But it’s still a judge’s final decision to increase any penalties for convictions.

State records also show that Gibert received a three-year prison sentence on a gun charge back in 2000 in Duval County. Online records of that case show that he accepted the prison term after being charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. It wasn’t immediately clear what crimes he was convicted of previous to the sentence.

Other charges against Gibert over the years were mostly for possession of drugs and paraphernalia. There were also grand theft and battery charges in Miami-Dade in 2012 and 2013.

He was also charged by Miami-Dade state prosecutors in January 2022 with aggravated assault on police and fire rescue officers. Court records from that case indicate that Gibert started a ruckus at Mt. Sinai Medical Center after being told he was being released.

At first, his arrest form says, Gibert refused to leave his room. After a while he got up, went outside the room, grabbed two sandwiches and sat down on a chair near the door. When a nurse approached, the report says, he reached into his bag and pulled out a box cutter, which he put under his left armpit.

Three security guards showed up, but backed off after Gibert allegedly said, “I’m not leaving. If you try to make me leave, I got something for you.” He was taken into custody a few minutes later by police. The case was closed less than a month later due to “insufficient evidence,” court records show.