Daytona Beach, FL – A Daytona Beach man is now in custody after a Volusia County grand jury indicts him for first-degree murder.
Thomas A. Prins is charged with killing Crystal C. Pifer this past August, according to the indictment paperwork filed on Monday in 7th Circuit Court.
Prins was arrested at a home on Oak Forest Drive in Ormond Beach around 2pm Tuesday.
The 42-year-old will be held without bond at Volusia County Jail, according to Spencer Hathaway, a spokesman for 7th Circuit State Attorney RJ Larizza.
Port Orange Police Department investigators think Prins – Pifer’s boyfriend – killed her sometime between August 11th and 12th on a boat as it floated on the Halifax.
Pifer’s dead body was found floating by a passerby in a canal just north of the Dunlawton Avenue bridge around 7am on August 12th.
The 28-year-old Daytona Beach woman was the target of an unsuccessful South Daytona police search during the overnight, hours before she was found dead.
According to the SDPD incident report, an officer was sent to the Riverfront Veterans Memorial Park around 10:45pm on August 11th after Pifer and Prins allegedly got into a fight on his boat as it floated on the river.
A witness told SDPD he was paddling in his boat when Pifer jumped on board and told him her boyfriend was beating her up. Pifer then returned to her boyfriend’s boat and got into an argument as the paddler headed back to the park’s boat ramp to pick up his child, per the report.
The officer wrote in the report that she found the boat later on that night heading south on the ICW and could clearly hear from the shore that some sort of verbal argument was going on between 2 people on board the board.
SDPD says the officer tried to have POPD get in contact with the people on board once the boat docked, but neither police nor Volusia County Beach Safety units searching the area was able to find the boat afterward, including a helicopter from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office.
911 dispatchers say a call came in around an hour after the officer spotted the boat, claiming that a woman – since identified as Pifer – jumped off of a boat and was swimming towards shore.
According to the SDPD report, the person who called 911 said Pifer was a “good swimmer” and police had no indication at the time that she was either in distress or that a crime of some kind had been committed.
Thomas A. Prins (mugshot courtesy VCJ)
Crystal A. Pifer
Copyright 2015 Southern Stone Communications.