Aaron Alexander Cooper, a 26-year-old Male, was a young man from Virginia who loved the beach, swimming, and had a keen interest in military aircraft. Born in Bath, Maine, on September 27, 1983, to Kim M. Strickland and George W. Cooper, his life was described as having been taken "in a violent way." That violence occurred on July 28, 2010, not in the free world he had known, but within the stark confines of Red Onion State Prison, a supermax facility in Pound, Virginia. At the time of his death, Aaron was serving a 34-year sentence for robbery and carjacking.
His death came at the hands of a fellow inmate, Robert Charles Gleason, a man who was already serving a life sentence for one murder and had killed another inmate just a year prior. Gleason was a serial killer who openly threatened to continue his killing spree behind bars unless the state of Virginia sentenced him to death.
He had been sent to Red Onion, the state's most secure prison, after murdering his 63-year-old cellmate, Harvey Gray Watson, at Wallens Ridge State Prison in 2009.
On that summer day in 2010, both Aaron and Gleason were in separate, individual outdoor cages for their mandated hour of recreation. The cages were separated by wire fencing. Gleason had fashioned a noose from torn bedsheets, which he managed to conceal from guards. He persuaded Aaron to come close to the fence, reportedly convincing him to try on what he called a necklace. Gleason then slipped the ligature through the wire fence and strangled Aaron. Surveillance footage of the recreation yard showed that the horrific act unfolded over a period of nearly an hour, with Gleason intermittently choking Aaron. When guards finally discovered what had happened and tried to resuscitate him, Gleason callously told them, "you're going to have to pump a lot harder than that."
Gleason’s path to becoming a triple murderer began before he was incarcerated. In 2007, he shot and killed 54-year-old Michael Kent Jamerson in Amherst County to prevent him from cooperating with a federal investigation into a drug ring. For this crime, he received a life sentence in 2008. True to his word that he would kill again if not given a death sentence, he murdered Watson in 2009 and then Aaron in 2010. He pleaded guilty to both prison murders, waiving his appeals and demanding the death penalty.
In the aftermath of Aaron's death, his mother, Kim Strickland, filed a $95 million wrongful-death lawsuit against 15 prison officials and guards. The lawsuit alleged that the prison staff had a duty to protect her son and had failed, allowing Gleason to carry out his threat. Gleason himself claimed he had arranged favors with guards to bypass a strip search, enabling him to smuggle the makeshift noose into the yard. Despite these claims and the distressing circumstances of the murder, a federal judge ultimately ruled there was not enough evidence to prove the officials were legally culpable for Aaron's death.
Robert Charles Gleason got the sentence he had pursued through bloodshed. He was convicted of two counts of capital murder and sentenced to death. On January 16, 2013, at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia, Gleason was executed by electric chair, a method he chose over lethal injection. He was the last person to be executed in Virginia before the state abolished capital punishment in 2021. Aaron's family mourned a young man who would be greatly missed, remembering his love for life and holding onto their faith that he was with God. He was laid to rest in a cemetery in Fairfield, Maine.
