Son, 3, said dad hurt mom; 26 years later, jury agrees

Aaron Fraser was just 3 when his mother disappeared in 1993 and he told the authorities that his father had done something to hurt her.

“Daddy shot Mommy,” he said then, according to court documents. “Daddy placed Mommy in time out.”

That account, from the mouth of child, was not enough to solve the case. But as an adult, Fraser would find the evidence that would.

The discovery came after more than two decades, years in which Fraser was adopted, won a wrongful death judgment against his biological father and acquired the rights to his childhood home in Jacksonville, Florida. He was doing renovations on the property in 2014 when he struck something in the ground and realized he had stumbled upon his mother’s remains.

His testimony, from 1993 and now, bookended a cold case that went to trial this week, 26 years after Fraser’s mother, Bonnie Haim, disappeared. On Friday, a jury found Fraser’s biological father, Michael Haim, 52, guilty of second-degree murder.

“While some sins can be buried away, they are never forgotten,” Alan Mizrahi, a state prosecutor, said during the trial. “The truth was always out there, buried in their own backyard.”

Fraser was in the courthouse for the verdict Friday and took the stand shortly afterward to testify about how his mother’s death had changed his life. “I continue to see my therapist from when I was 31/2 years old,” he said.

The jury was considering factors for sentencing late Friday afternoon.

Bonnie Haim went missing in 1993 after she made plans to leave her husband. She had saved money, looked for a new apartment and made plans to take her son and move out, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

But on the night of Jan. 6, 1993, she disappeared after the Haims discussed their marriage problems, the authorities said. Michael Haim maintained that she had simply left the house.

The next day, her purse was found in a dumpster and her car was found in an airport parking lot.

A tennis shoe imprint on the driver’s side floorboard was consistent with a pair of shoes belonging to Michael Haim, according to the affidavit.

In an interview with child protective workers, the couple’s young son gave a variety of accounts that his father had somehow hurt his mother, according to court documents. “My daddy could not wake her up,” he said at the time.

But with Bonnie Haim still missing, the case went unsolved, and Fraser grew up to have no memory of what had happened.

Gail S. Goodman, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies eyewitness memory in children, said childhood amnesia can make it so that early experiences, even traumatic ones, are lost from memory. But she said young children can still serve as witnesses and should be taken seriously.

In the mid-2000s, a judge in civil court, which has a lower evidence standard than in criminal cases, found Michael Haim liable for the death of his wife and granted their son a multimillion-dollar judgment.

By 2014, Fraser was in his 20s and had obtained the title to his childhood home, which he rented out.

He was doing construction to remove the swimming pool when he accidentally dug up human remains.

“I saw what I describe as something that looked like coconut,” Fraser said in court this week, describing how he called his psychologist afterward and left her a message: “I think I might have found my mom.”

DNA testing confirmed the remains were Bonnie Haim’s.