By Shayna Jacobs, Gabriela Resto-Montero and Nicole Bode
DNAinfo Staff
A millionairess tearfully pleaded not guilty Tuesday to murdering her 8-year-old autistic son at the Peninsula Hotel.
Gigi Jordan, 49, was ordered held without bail at Elmhurst Hospital, after earlier wiping away tears with her handcuffed hands as her high-powered defense lawyer told a judge that psychiatric problems had plagued the single mom.
"Not guilty," said the soft-spoken Jordan, when asked about her plea to charges that she murdered her only son Jude Michael Mirra on Feb. 5 in a room at the Fifth Avenue hotel.
Jordan was wearing an oversized grey sweatshirt, as seen in a video stream of the arraignment from the Queens hospital to a Manhattan courtroom.
"This is probably the saddest case that I've ever taken on," Jordan's high-powered defense attorney Gerald Shargel told reporters Tuesday afternoon.
A judge denied Shargel's request to allow Jordan to enter a psychiatric facility on a $5 million cash bail release.
Prosecutors shot down the proposal, calling the suggested bail a "mere drop in the bucket" compared to Jordan's worth, estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, from her time as a pharmaceutical executive.
Shargel, who has represented high-profile defendants including John Gotti, Robert Halderman and Marc Dreier, showed the judge one of Jordan's e-mails in hopes of proving her unstable mental health and convincing the judge to send her to the psychiatric facility.
When the facts surrouding the boy's tragic death are made public, people will symapthize with Jordan's plight, Shargel said.
"The heart of any decent person would go out to [Jordan]," he added.
The arraignment started shortly before the boy's body was finally claimed from the city morgue, 11 days after the murder.
Representatives from the Andrett Funeral Home on Second Avenue picked up the body around 1 p.m. Tuesday, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for the city's Medical Examiner.
The body had been claimed once before by a different funeral home, but had to be returned a day later because of a feud between the boy's relatives, officials said.
The conflict between the boy's biological father, Emil Tzekov, and maternal grandmother Kimberly Jordan had to be resolved before the office could legally release the body.
Tzekov relinquished his legal rights over the boy when the child was young, at Jordan's request, the Daily News reported.
A staffer at Andrett Funeral Home said they were working with the family to prepare the final details, but declined to say which side of the family made the arrangements.
