Photo: Marion County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook
Florida police believe a Florida couple whose remains were found in their mobile home eight months ago were victims of homicide.
Robert Cooper, 37, and his 29-year-old wife Ariel Prim were discovered in their Ocala home shortly after it caught fire on the morning of July 28, 2018. According to theOcala Star Banner, a neighbor saw smoke coming from the home and notified police. When firefighters arrived they had to cut the locks off a gate to get to the burning home, the paper reports.
At the time, the Medical Examiner’s Office ruled their deaths to be of undetermined causes and the Marion County Sheriff’s Office was investigating their deaths as “suspicious.”
But last week, the medical examiner’s office changed its ruling to homicide. It is unclear if Cooper and Prim died as a result of the blaze or if they were killed prior to it.
“We knew from the beginning it was a homicide,” Cooper’s mother, Karen Cooper, tells PEOPLE. “This wasn’t ‘I just got mad at you and decided to kill you.’ They had a plan. Whoever did this, it wasn’t a crime of passion, it was premeditated.”
Marion County Fire Rescue/Facebook
“Somebody knows something and nobody is talking,” she adds. “I am looking for justice for Rob and Ariel. Nothing like this happens in a vacuum. We had such plans for the future with them, and nothing will ever be the same ever.”
Karen says the couple, who worked together as IT and electronic repair consultants, owned seven Chihuahas and all but three perished in the fire. The house, she says, was completely destroyed: “There was literally nothing left.”
Karen says she spoke to her son at 11:45 p.m. on the night before the couple’s death. “They were going to eat some food and watch some movies on their laptop and hang out,” she says.
Leading up to his death she says she felt her son was worried about something. “You could tell there was something wrong but he wouldn’t tell me,” she says. “He was trying to get money together.”
Karen says the couple had plans to move out of Ocala and move closer to her and her husband. “They were going to do other jobs,” she says. “Quit what they were doing. He was going to install stereos.”
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Her son, she says, was an avid gamer who met Prim while playing Final Fantasy XI 11 years ago. “They started playing together, teaming up, and started teaming up in real life,” she says.
Prim, she says, was a “great person.” Karen described her son as a “jokester.”
“He was just a great friend,” she says. “He was a pleasure to have as a son.”
The couple were avid animal lovers who also owned three horses and a goat named Shamus.
“They loved their animals,” she says. “They took the goat because they couldn’t stand the thought of the goat as goat meat.”
She says the animals are now with family members and Shamus is living on a goat farm.
Moving forward has been difficult, she says.
The families of the couple have set up aGoFundMepage to help pay for the couple’s funeral and increase a $5,000 reward for information about their deaths. Anyone with information about the couple’s murder is asked to contact the Marion County Crime Stoppers at 352-368-STOP.
source: people.com
