His trip finally began one night in June, when he climbed into a railcar in Baltimore, leaving his home without a map, an itinerary or a specific destination.

For months, he crisscrossed the country — Pittsburgh, Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, Tenn. — hitching truck rides and hopping trains.

His meandering trip ended at McIntosh Power Plant, where workers found his body and that of Medeana Dina Hendershot of South Carolina this week among several thousand pounds of coal. Artes, 25, and Hendershot, 22, may have been aboard a coal train that arrived late Saturday night in Lakeland, police said. The couple appeared to have died as the coal, about 12,500 tons total, was dumped from the train, plunging the equivalent of multiple stories.

Artes grew up in the Baltimore area, said his mother, Susie Artes, 62, who adopted him when he was a newborn.

At 16, he fell in with a group of kids who mingled with a network of “travelers,” people who knew which railyards to linger in for a ride and who didn’t stay in one place too long. He developed a romantic vision of one day living outdoors and traveling from town to town as they did.

“With the traveling, it seemed almost like you could go anywhere and be anyone and it would be exciting all the time,” his mother said. “There would be this wonderful freedom to be whoever you wanted to be.”

Artes hopped his first train when he was 22 and rode from Baltimore to New York City, she said. He once had a book, an underground guide to hopping trains, that circulated among his friends.

The day he left in June, she took him to Kmart and bought him rugged shoes for traveling. He spent the rest of the day packing and repacking, trying to decide how much to bring in the way of warm clothes.

“He knew we were worried about him. He knew we were scared,” she said Wednesday from her home in Baltimore. “There wasn’t any way in the world anybody could talk him out of this.”

Artes eventually traveled to South Carolina to meet Hendershot, she said. They had only known each other through friends. But after a week together, they fell in love. They wore rings and told friends they were married.

As he traveled, Artes called his mother and sent her pictures. Two weeks ago, the couple reached Miami, where a stranger allowed them to stay in his apartment for a week.

They traveled to Orlando and then to Georgia, where they decided to head south again for warm weather.

He last called his mother at 2 p.m. Saturday, Susie Artes said. He also sent her pictures of where they were camping near a train overpass, but she was uncertain of their exact location.

Artes was a mix of streetwise and naive. He was savvy enough to hitch a free ride, she said, but lacked the foresight to anticipate the danger that awaited him.

“If there’s any consolation in this, it was that he was happy,” she said. “And it happened so quickly that he didn’t realize it.”

The train that arrived in Lakeland that night had about 120 cars, each carrying 100 tons of coal, said Tony Candales, an assistant general manager at Lakeland Electric. As it pulled into the plant, the train’s boxcars would have opened on the bottom, emptying the coal.

“It’s quite a drop,” Candales said.

The boxcars had open tops, which would have allowed someone to lie on the coal.

“It’s hard for me to imagine,” he said. “But obviously it can be done.”

Hendershot died from injuries received from a blunt force delivered to her torso, said Dr. Vera Volnikh, a Polk County associate medical examiner. The injury could have been received while falling from the boxcar.

Volnikh hasn’t yet determined Artes’ cause of death. She said the tumbling coal could have cut off his oxygen, causing him to suffocate.

“If he gets covered by that amount of coal, he wouldn’t have any way to breathe,” she said. “It’s like being in a grave.”

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.