On the night of August 31, 2023, police in Florida responded to frantic 911 calls from neighbors reporting a person covered in blood knocking on doors. Upon arrival, police officers discovered Robbie Tower (49) and his wife, Jennifer Tower (51), brutally stabbed to death. Investigators found that Robbie had been stabbed 68 times and Jennifer 79 times. The prime suspect was their adopted son, 21-year-old Dima Tower.
Police dashcam footage posted by Midwest Safety and Interrogation Files shows that the suspect fled in a black car when he spotted the police arriving. He drove the wrong way into oncoming traffic during a high-speed chase.
After police cornered him, the suspect abandoned the vehicle and fled. Documents left in the car identified the driver as Dima Tower, who was originally adopted by Robbie and Jennifer from an orphanage in Ukraine as a teenager.
Meanwhile, investigators found blood trails going into almost every residence in the area. After entering the Tower residence, they discovered the deceased couple. Multiple rooms of the house and the area near the kitchen sink were covered in blood. Police also found diluted blood and a stained towel, which suggested that the killer tried to clean up before fleeing the scene.
Hours later, Dima Tower was spotted at a nearby Shell gas station buying a drink with cash. Police arrived after a clerk reported looking at his bloody hands and dirty appearance, and arrested him without further incident. After he was taken into the police station, officers tried to make conversation with him. However, he started to sob and refused to speak much.
When asked whether he got along with his parents, Dima answered, “Talking about it doesn’t make me feel better. They’re strangers. They say they want to bring you into your family, but where I come from, it’s not that easy. (I) should have stayed in Ukraine.”
Dima said that it was his “rage” that led him to take such drastic measures. “We’ve been through so much, been arguing about…family issues,” he said.
Authorities found that between 2018 and 2020, Robbie and Jennifer called the police multiple times regarding physical assaults by Dima. On one occasion, he gave his adoptive father a black eye.
Police were once called when Dima was spotted near an elementary school with a BB gun his mother gave him. In 2019, Tower was taken into police custody near an elementary school while carrying a BB gun and toy soldiers, though he was later released. That incident, however, was entirely separate and was not the reason for his release in the 2023 murder case. Background check also revealed that Robbie asked police to put Dima under Florida’s Baker Act, which involves a 72-hour mental health hold. However, officers decided he didn’t meet the legal requirements.
Dima’s parents had previously sent him to live with relatives in West Virginia. However, forgiving him and hoping to help him start over, they brought him back to Florida, gave him a bank card, and bought him the black car he later used to flee the murder scene. After 20 minutes with the police, Dima started to open up slowly. When asked to give his side of the story, he kept insisting that there is more to it than what meets the eye. “(It) has a lot to do with everything that I’ve been through and the anger and such,” he said.
When asked why he killed the couple who took him in, Dima cited built-up rage, hatred for the United States, and resentment toward his parents.
“I want to run. I want to go back to Ukraine…Personally, I want to go back to Ukraine because I’m sick of that. No discussion, putting up in America, you get whatever you want. Life’s easy, but I don’t see like that. How do you see it?… I’m basically a nobody coming from nowhere. My adopted parents really never taught me anything.”
He admitted to grabbing a kitchen knife from the butcher block, stabbing his father while he was asleep, and then attacking his mother. When the first knife slipped or broke, he retrieved a second one. He admitted he washed off in canals and was trying to reach a port in Orlando to sneak onto a ship and return to Ukraine.
In court, Dima testified in his own defense. He kept his gaze low, and his combative behavior toward the prosecutor shocked everyone. Dima made a critical admission to the jury as he stated that while sitting in his car outside the home, he decided to kill his parents before walking inside. “I was not in my completely right state of mind…They were not my parents…I was temporarily insane…,” he said.
Because Dima Tower explicitly admitted to planning the attack, the jury found Dima Tower guilty on all counts, including two counts of first-degree murder and one count of fleeing law enforcement. The judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Viewers in the comments section sympathized with the adoptive parents and condemned Dima Tower’s action. “The amount of stabs he inflicted on his parents is worth a death sentence, not a life sentence,” one commentator wrote.
Another added, “He was a teen when Robbie and Jennifer adopted him… many of his thoughts about America were already formed. Dina’s argument of his American parents did not instill fundamentals is a joke. That 21-year-old has hated America and his American parents since day one.”
“Kinda ironic how much he hates this country, yet his horrible actions ensured he’s going to die here. RIP Robbie and Jennifer,” read a separate comment.
Disclaimer: Inquisitr could not independently confirm the facts of this incident and is reporting based on the information available within the public video record.
