Around 5 p.m. Saturday, Debra Cooper, tattoo legend Roy “Roy Boy” Cooper’s ex-wife and business partner, arrived at the Grand Army of the Republic cemetery in Watseka, Illinois, equipped with a shovel, blanket and dolly.

With her late husband’s headstone missing from the family plot since Tuesday, she decided to take son Diamond Cody Cooper’s headstone and put it somewhere else.

“I didn’t want my son to be there alone without his dad,” Cooper, co-owner of The Badlands at 3844 Broadway in Gary, said Sunday morning. Roy Boy was known for his tattoo studio and the tigers he kept there, until they were confiscated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2010, shortly before he died.

In the process of trying to dig up her son’s headstone, which she said was too heavy to move, Debra Cooper

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