Robert Tincher III told police that he heard "numerous bones break" when he put his 82-year-old grandma in the freezer.
Floyd County Police DepartmentThough 29-year-old Robert Tincher III stands accused of leaving his grandmother to die in a freezer, they apparently had a good relationship before her death.
When 82-year-old Doris Cumming took a fall in her Armuchee, Georgia home in December 2021, her grandson could have called 911 for help. Instead, Robert Keith Tincher III allegedly wrapped her up in plastic bags, dragged her across the house, and forcibly stuffed her into a freezer, where she died.
According to People, Tincher, 29, hesitated to call for help because of an outstanding warrant for his arrest. In 2018, he had allegedly attempted to hire a hitman on Facebook to kill his wife and then failed to appear in court.
So when Cumming took a fall, Tincher took matters into his own hands. According to The Charlotte Observer, he placed plastic bags around his still-breathing grandmother and pulled her toward the freezer. He told police he heard and saw “numerous bones break” as he dragged her body and that “her back broke” when he crammed his grandmother into the small space.
“From what we determined, at the time, he believed she was still breathing and had some movement at the time she was going into the freezer,” explained Floyd County Investigator Brittany Werner.
Tincher kept the freezer at the home until March 2022, when he moved it to a storage unit. According to the Floyd County Police Department, that’s where investigators found Cumming’s body.
They had been notified by another family member who was concerned that Cumming was missing. The family member noted that Cumming may have moved out of the state, but they were concerned that nobody had heard anything from her in several months.
Police then found Cumming’s body in the storage unit. Their suspicion fell on Tincher, who had been living with Cumming before her disappearance and had apparently planned to move out of state with her.
He was arrested, booked into Floyd County Jail, and charged with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, and concealing the death of another.
Tincher has also been charged with a felony for his failure to appear in court in 2018. In that case, he allegedly asked a man over Facebook Messenger to put his then-wife Courtney “six feet deep.”
But though Tincher later described how his grandmother moved and breathed while in the freezer in “graphic detail,” according to a Floyd County Police Department news release, police say that Tincher did not kill Cumming following any “altercation or provocation.”
In fact, Tincher himself told police that he’d always gotten along well with his grandmother. He said that of all his family members, she was the only one who seemed to understand him.
“He said she was the only family member that gave him the courtesy and love and attention he needed,” Werner stated.
It’s currently unknown if Tincher, who remains in jail, has a lawyer through whom he can make a statement. Nor have any of Tincher or Cumming’s family members appeared to have spoken publicly about her death.
For now, the Georgie Bureau of Investigation is planning to conduct an autopsy on Doris Cumming’s remains so they can determine exactly when and how she died. Based on Tincher’s statements so far, however, it seems that she might have survived her initial fall if he’d only called for help.
After reading about the man who stuffed his grandmother in a freezer while she was still alive, see how Mitchelle Blair killed her children and hid their remains in a freezer for years. Or, learn about the 11-year-old Arizona boy who shot his grandmother after she asked him to clean his room.
