Cooper Barrett, a veteran of the second Iraq War, came to Port Charles under inauspicious circumstances. He was part of a highly trained group of masked robbers that took the Metro Court Hotel hostage in February 2007. Known only by numbers, "Three" was caught as effectively as his hostage, Maxie Jones, when the lobby desk clerk, Samantha McCall, pressed the silent alarm trapping them in the vault for the 12-hour lockdown.

To pass the hours, terrified, Maxie confided everything about herself to her captor. When Maxie boldly and stupidly unmasked him, Three became as much a person to her as she had become to him. Three threw himself over Maxie to protect her when the bombs exploded in the lobby and, in the chaos, Maxie returned the favor pretending he was a fellow hostage, allowing him to escape. Unable to leave town while the search raged on to find the robbers, Three sought out Maxie for help.

Recognizing Three, Coop, as a kindred spirit, Maxie encouraged him to stay in Port Charles. As an employee of the Boutique in the MC Hotel, Maxie asked owner, Jasper Jacks, to hire Coop for hotel security giving him a personal reference as the brother of a boarding school friend. The only hitch in Maxie's plan was head of MC Security, Max Giambetti, who had a nagging suspicion that he knew Coop from somewhere. When Coop stopped a purse snatching, Max recognized Coop as one of the robbers and tapped Stan Johnson to look into Coop's background.

Armed with the truth, Max turned to his real boss, mobster Sonny Corinthos, with the information. First threatening to kill Coop, Sonny blackmailed him into joining the police academy to give Sonny's organization an inside man. With Maxie's help studying and stealing a copy of the entrance exam, Coop was easily able to get into the police academy.

Adding to the tension, Coop's army buddy, Logan Hayes arrived in Port Charles looking for trouble. Though Coop went along with Maxie and Logan's scheme to blackmail Scott Baldwin over the murder of Rick Webber and pin it on Maxie's longtime foe Lulu Spencer, he never felt good about their scheme. Despite his own weakness, succumbing to the blackmail against him held by Sonny and the ringleader of the MC Hotel robbery, he was, at heart, the good guy that Maxie saw in him that first day in the MC Hotel vault. For months he lived in Port Charles innocuously trying to make his way and build a life with Maxie. He tried to help his fellow vet Cody with his PTSD. He and Logan broke up a gunfight in the abandoned Cellar club and he shot the gunman holding Maxie as a human shield. When Maxie began to spiral out of control, he took the situation in hand, breaking his own heart and hers, he ended it between them.

In the end, losing Coop was the wake-up call that Maxie needed to turn herself around and she finally convinced Coop to give her a second chance. Never though could the course of true love run smooth, this time, Georgie Jones, Maxie's baby sister was the one who couldn't quite get Coop out of her thoughts and she asked her friend Damian Spinelli to help her find out if Coop might be the text message killer stalking the women of Port Charles. Spin soon discovered that a woman was raped and murdered, strangled to death, in the Iraq town where Coop was stationed during the war. When Georgie was murdered soon after beginning her intrepid investigation, the skin tags found under her fingernails matched Coop. With the cops closing in, Coop stole the DNA results from the PCPD and asked Maxie to leave town with him. Maxie agreed, but when she returned to Kelly's, she found Coop hanged to death in his room, an apparent suicide.

The PCPD called the case closed, but Maxie could believe that Coop would have killed himself or Georgie. With Spinelli's help, she vowed to find the real killer to clear Coop's name.