LAKELAND | Linda Thames brushed a broom across the gravestone.
Rick Runion, The Ledger
Gospel music boomed from her car and across an empty cemetery. She hummed as she cleaned, sweeping in short, quick strokes until dust cleared from a name etched in the granite.
Eric Teron Cook.
Ten years ago, Cook, her only child, pulled his Cadillac next to a Harden Boulevard gas station. A group of men approached, bandanas over their faces. One fired a gun, hitting Cook, and the group pulled him from the car. Lakeland police have said it appears the group randomly chose the 30-year-old for a carjacking.
Thames isn’t so sure. She said her son might have been set up and that someone with information about the killing is keeping quiet.
After a decade of silence, Thames is determined to keep her son’s memory — and the Lakeland police file on the killing — from gathering dust.
She wants closure for herself and for the young daughter Cook left behind.
Every few months, she cleans the plot where Cook is buried in Bartow. On a recent December morning, after sweeping the gravestone, she scrubbed it with mildew remover.
“I just want somebody to go to jail,” Thames said, standing over the grave. “I don’t think that’s asking too much.”
THE SHOOTING
Eric Cook liked looking good. When his mother closes her eyes, she can still see his crisp suit and backward Kangol hat.
His fashion sense extended to his cars. Cook restored a 1988 black Cadillac Fleetwood with money he made working in phosphate mines near his Janeen Circle home in Mulberry.
“That was his own personal masterpiece,” said Thames, 56.
Cook usually avoided driving the attention-grabbing car at night, leery someone would attempt to steal it, relatives said. But one night in December 2001, Cook decided to take his car out with a cousin, David Black.
Thames said she is unsure where they were headed, but she thought they attended a party in Mulberry and were going to another get-together in Lakeland.
Here is what Lakeland police said happened next on Dec. 7, 2001:
Black needed to use the bathroom about 12:20 a.m., and Cook decided to park his Cadillac near a gas station at 1916 Harden Blvd. While out of the car, Black heard someone say, “Get out of the car,” followed by a popping sound.
Three masked men had approached Cook and ordered him out. Before he could exit, one of them shot him in the abdomen.
The group got away in the Cadillac and another vehicle that had pulled behind it when they arrived. Cook’s cousin told police the shooter ordered him to stay back or he would also be shot.
Cook died at Lakeland Regional Medical Center more than an hour later. His Cadillac was discovered the next morning in woods off State Road 60 in Willow Oak, about one mile from where he lived.
It had been burned.
‘CONNECTED FOR LIFE’
Thames was a teenager when she became pregnant with Cook. She was too scared to tell her grandmother, who raised her, but something on her 15-year-old face gave it away.
“The older people knew things we don’t know,” said Thames.
At a young age, Thames resolved to take care of Cook on her own, she said. At 19, she enrolled in classes at the Traviss Career Center in Lakeland. She saw herself working in accounting or running her own business.
When working full-time and attending classes became too much, she said, she worked as a day laborer for a Mulberry phosphate company and eventually took on more skilled jobs. The ones she worked allowed her to make it home in time to greet Cook when he returned from school.
The two held irreplaceable positions in each others lives. As a symbol of that, Cook bought a set of earrings a few years before his death. He gave Thames one for Mother’s Day and kept the other for himself.
“Now we’re connected for life,” Thames remembers him saying. “But he didn’t realize we were already connected.”
‘COME FORWARD’
Lakeland police say they have extensively investigated Cook’s killing but have run out of viable leads.
Cook had a criminal history that included drug possession. But it doesn’t appear Cook was involved in activity before his death that would have made him the target of a carjacking, said Brad Grice, an LPD detective.
A crime that occurred soon after Cook’s killing seemed to suggest his attackers had other victims. The month Cook died, two men on Bassadena Circle were victims of a similar carjacking. A group of three men in a Toyota Camry ordered them out of their Lincoln Town Car at gunpoint. The car was later found burning in Plant City.
Thames has her own theories about what led to her son’s death, ones she can’t prove. She asked for a meeting with Lakeland police in December, and detectives assured her the case has been not forgotten.
Police still tightly guard the investigation’s details. But they say it has taken them out of state to question witnesses. Grice said that at one point they had a suspect in mind, but he wouldn’t release that person’s name.
Thames and Grice agree on one thing: Someone has details that could assist in bringing closure to the case.
“There are some people out there that have information. We know they do,” Grice said. “We want them to come forward.”
‘WHAT CAN I SAY?’
Decorations on Cook’s grave used to be more elaborate. Thames once covered the plot with mulch and lined its edges with solar-powered lights.
Another arrangement involved artificial snow and a small Christmas tree.
Cemetery management sent her a letter politely requesting she stop, Thames said, in part because it was distracting other visitors and creating an obstacle for yard crews.
The latest decoration left a few weeks before Christmas was modest by comparison, an arrangement of angels, gold-colored reindeer figurines and poinsettias.
“What can I say?” she said. “I just want him to look good.”
When she finished, Thames dabbed away sweat, unfolded a chair and inspected her work.
The gravestone was gleaming.
