It was a single-story, three-bedroom ranch house on a quiet residential street in a northern stretch of Jacksonville, Florida. Aaron Fraser had not lived inside since he was 4 years old, and the four walls held plenty of ugly memories and unresolved questions. But in December 2014, after the 24-year-old took possession of the house, he and his brother-in-law rolled up their sleeves for a renovation.
According to the Florida Times-Union, the two men began by smashing apart a swimming pool in the back with a rented excavator. At one point, the machine cracked a large concrete slab near an outdoor shower. Aaron began hacking at the pieces with a sledgehammer. Below in the dirt, he found a plastic bag, and from inside he pulled something out. It was a coconut, he thought.
"Why would someone bury a coconut in a bag?" Aaron asked his brother-in-law, according to News4Jax.
Then, the men noticed the teeth and eye sockets. It was a skull.
The discovery alone was a shock. But for Aaron, the human remains sunk below a layer of concrete in his boyhood home snapped the jumbled pieces of a family mystery into place. In January 1993, his mother, Bonnie Haim, had vanished. Police suspected her husband, Aaron's father, Michael Haim, of murdering his wife. Those suspicions started with what Aaron, who was then 3, had told authorities.
"Daddy hurt her," Aaron had said, the Times-Union reported. But Aaron's own family doubted the little boy's foggy account, and no physical evidence tied Michael to the crime.
But that day in December 2014, standing amid smashed concrete, Aaron was holding the evidence that would eventually lead to his father's arrest.
On Monday, the murder trial will start in Florida against Michael for his wife's 1993 murder. He maintains he was not involved in his wife's death. According to the Times-Union, Aaron is expected to testify, relaying his memories from when he possibly witnessed his mother's death, as well as the gruesome discovery that jump-started the cold case in 2014.
"Next month is going to hurt," Bonnie Haim's family members wrote last month about the upcoming trial on a Facebook page decided to her memory. "It is going to rip off bandages and expose us to things we had long ago pushed to the back of our memories. But sometimes we have to rip off bandages to really begin to heal."
Read more:
'Daddy hurt her': Nobody believed a boy's story — until he dug up the backyard 20 years later
