Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice by Maureen Faulkner, Michael A. Smerconish

From the Publisher

Maureen Faulkner's husband, Philadelphia police office Danny Faulkner, was shot between the eyes on a cold December night in 1981. Mumia Abu-Jamal was unanimously convicted of the crime by a racially mixed jury based on: the testimony of several eyewitnesses, his ownership of the murder weapon, matching ballistics, and Abu-Jamal's own confession.
After his conviction, however, a national anti-death penalty movement was started to "Free Mumia;" Mike Farrell, Ed Asner, Whoopi Goldberg, and Jesse Jackson rallied on his behalf, and led the charge. For his part, while on death row, Abu-Jamal published several books, delivered radio commentaries, was a college commencement speaker, found himself named an Honorary Citizen of France, and had his defense coffers enhanced by ticket sales from a sold out (16,000-person) concert featuring Rage Against the Machine.
Here, from Maureen Faulkner and acclaimed talk show host / journalist Michael Smerconish, is the first book to carefully and definitively lay out the case against Abu-Jamal, and those who've elevated him to the status of political prisoner. Smerconish, a lawyer, has provided pro bono legal counsel to Faulkner for over a decade and knows both the legal intricacies and personal subtleties of the case like no other person. He's personally acquainted himself with the more than five thousand pages of trial transcript. "My reading starkly revealed that Abu-Jamal murdered Danny Faulkner in cold blood and that the case tried in Philadelphia in 1982 bore no resemblance to the one being home-cooked by the Abu-Jamal defense team."
As Abu-Jamal's lawyers contemplate their final appeal, Faulkner and Smerconish weave a compelling,never-before-told account of one fateful night and the 25-year-long rewriting of history.

What People Are Saying

Buzz Bissinger
"This is a harrowing book, told with uncommon grace and dignity. Maureen Faulkner is an incredible woman. The story she tells, of being denied for more than a quarter century the dignity of burying her police officer husband in peace, is even more incredible."--(Buzz Bissinger - Author of Friday Night Lights)

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The knock. That rap on the door that is the dread of all of the spouses of people who put their lives on the line-cops, firefighters, EMTs, the military, each profession with its own protocol. I got that knock in the early morning hours of a bitter-cold Wednesday, December 9, 1981, when my fitful slumber was interrupted by the thud of destiny.

That night I had trouble sleeping, so I went down and fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. I was awakened by the sound of a rap on the door. It was a gentle tapping but it sounded like a cannon shot to me. I quickly looked at the clock and saw that it was a little after 4:00 a.m. I got up and looked through the window to where a police officer was standing on the step. With his shiny adornments glistening against the dark night, I thought maybe I was dreaming. My heart pounded furiously against my ribcage and my knees felt weak as I opened the door. There was not one police officer but three standing there, two men and a woman. I let them into the living room and one of the men solemnly spoke. "Your husband has been shot and they've taken him to Jefferson Hospital." I felt disconnected from my body as I darted up the steps to put on some clothes. As we headed out the door, somebody said, "Why don't you call Danny's mother." I replied that she had a bad heart and I didn't want to call his mom until I knew he was OK. At the time, Danny's brother Joe was quite sick, so I wasn't sure she could take any bad news on the phone. I called my own mother instead. The familiar sound of her voice pierced the surrealism of the night and sent me into a sharp panic. My throat went completely dry. In halting phrases, I finally got it out that Dan had been shot and I was going to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. My words came spastically as the telephone rocked in my trembling hands. I'm sure she thought of her premonition, but not a word was mentioned of it at the time.

Within minutes, the female cop and I were in a marked police car racing into Center City. No sirens, just the piercing lights. I heard the police radio blasting but it was quickly turned off. This was no dream and, in the silence of the ride, I was forced to confront the reality of the situation. My thoughts were racing all over the place yet fiercely focused on my husband, and I was thinking about our last few days together. Danny had gone to work on his normal midnight to 8:00 a.m. shift on Monday night. When he got home Tuesday morning, I was still home, which was not our usual routine. I had been sick for a few days and had finally stayed home from work, hoping to shake off whatever it was. He was so happy to see me there, I almost forgot about how bad I felt.

Normally, when Danny worked the night shift, we just missed each other. I'd be in my car on the long commute to the suburbs by the time he walked through the front door. This day, however, we got to have breakfast together for a change. Afterwards, he handed me $200, a significant portion of his $900 monthly salary, to do some Christmas shopping when I was feeling better. After breakfast, I decided to keep him company as he sat at the dining room table and paid the monthly bills.

It was unusual for him to stay up instead of going right to bed. I remember him going over the household expenses before organizing the dining room and living room drawers. When I questioned him regarding his puzzling burst of enterprise, he simply retorted that "it ought to be done." Later on, he took a short nap. When he got up, he was thinking about taking the next shift off. A Chorus Line was playing in Philadelphia and we wanted to see it. He said, "You know what, Hon, since you're feeling better, let me see if I can get off from work and we can go see the show." He called the theater and found that the only seats available were up in the rafters. "Well, if we do go to the show, we should have good seats, so I'll just go to work," he reasoned. After going to the store to buy a couple of things, he cooked dinner for us, the last meal that we would have together.

After dinner, I sat on the couch with him. He decided he would go upstairs and sleep for a couple of hours before he had to go back to work. I remember him saying, "Come on up and lie down, too-you know I can't sleep without you." I remember that the two of us went up to bed and slept from probably 8:00 until the alarm went off around 10:00. We had a clock radio and I'll never forget that, when the radio alarm came on, we were lying in each other's arms and Barbra Streisand was singing "Coming In and Out of Your Life." That song has never stopped haunting me.

Listening to the song in a disoriented state of half-wakefulness and half-sleep, I was suddenly jolted by what I thought was a gunshot. I jumped up in bed in panic. When I told Danny that I thought I'd heard a gunshot, he calmly smiled back with gentle amusement, saying, "What are you talking about?" I now wonder if this was the same kind of premonition my mother felt, like something bad was going to happen. In retrospect, there were many curious events that foretold the harm that was to come his way. This was just another of them.

Danny was running late and decided that he'd better get dressed at home. Normally, he'd keep his uniform at work and dress at the district, but this night he dressed before he left. Unfortunately, his bulletproof vest was not at home, and he dressed for work without it. I sat at the edge of the bed and gave him a hug and kiss; he looked so great in his uniform. His quick kiss good-bye was the last moment I shared with my living husband-my kind, loving, irreplaceable husband who had little more than four hours to live. I missed him, as always, the minute he walked out the door.

Danny was a patrolman who worked the city's Sixth District, comprised of what the locals call "Center City" Philadelphia, where he policed the city's governmental, financial, and entertainment hub. After hours, certain streets turned a little ominous, and some slices of the city's less desirous underbelly were his responsibility. Together with his partner, Garry Bell, Danny "worked the wagon"-a two-man job unlike driving a patrol car, which was duty for one. Police wagons were used for transporting suspects and involved the type of risk that required two men. On this particular night, the wagon was "down on a mechanical." Garry later told me that he and Danny had flipped a coin to see which one would get to cruise the city streets in a warm patrol car and who would work on foot. Danny won the toss. He picked the patrol car.

Somehow, a news truck beat the squad car carrying me to Jefferson Hospital and the emergency room area was bustling with media. When we arrived, the female cop and I walked briskly through the automatic doors so we didn't have to talk to anyone. I was escorted to the policeman in charge and the woman who had driven me disappeared without a word. Come to think of it, I don't think we talked to each other at all. Unbeknownst to me, the female officer was just twenty-three years old at the time. She had been called by her lieutenant, Larry McShane, who was responsible for notifying me of the situation. They were both cops in the Twelfth District where Danny and I lived. Lieutenant McShane thought it appropriate to have a woman be part of the detail that came to tell me, and Cathy Kelley (née Clarkson) was the officer he asked. She was fresh out of the Police Academy, having graduated only three months earlier. She was from Narberth, out on Philadelphia's privileged Main Line, and despite becoming a police officer and being married to a cop, she was still unaccustomed to the perils of the job. Very quickly, she has since said, she learned how to "be stone-faced and cry in private." For her, having to notify me was a "9/11-like experience."

At Jefferson Hospital, I was escorted by a policeman into a room where Garry Bell and another friend, Eddie McGrory, sat waiting for news. Garry had not only seen the badly wounded body of his partner, he'd also seen the man who shot him, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and, as he would later attest, he'd heard Abu-Jamal admit that he shot Danny and add that he "hope[d] the motherfucker dies." When he heard that, Garry told Abu-Jamal that if Danny died, he would die. He was so rattled about what he had seen, and by this exchange, and no doubt concerned about me, that it would take him a while to remember those words, and of course, Garry told me none of this at the time. Thankfully, he was not the only one to hear Abu-Jamal's confession; a Thomas Jefferson employee heard it as well. That would all be discussed for years to come, but at that particular moment in the ER, it was hard to talk at all and we sat silently together, waiting for news of Danny's condition.

Although frightened at the prospect, I wanted desperately to see Danny. Somebody told me he was "being worked on" in the next room and I couldn't see him yet. Resigned to perhaps a long wait, I decided to go for a bathroom break. Walking down a hospital corridor, I heard a loud voice echoing from an adjacent area. I remember hearing the voice, not because of any words being said, but because of the man's shouts of defiance as opposed to cries of pain.

There was a lot of commotion besides the guy screaming. Somebody said, "That's the shooter." I couldn't make out what he was saying; I could just hear him yelling in anger. I never saw him that night. I would later learn that Abu-Jamal had refused treatment after arriving at the hospital. Finally, after talking to his own family and to surgeons, he allowed doctors to remove the bullet from his stomach. An attorney representing Abu-Jamal would later say that he'd been beaten, that there were bruises on his face, but a police spokesman, Detective Jerrold Kane, immediately refuted this claim, as did the physician who treated him that night at Jefferson. Two Philadelphia police officers, John McGurk and Daniel Sobolewski, later testified that as they carried a struggling and angry Abu-Jamal to a police van after the shooting they accidentally struck his head against a pole on Locust Street. Some would try to claim that was police brutality. But, Dr. Anthony Colletta, a surgical resident at Jefferson, would later testify that Abu-Jamal had lacerations on his forehead and lip and swelling on his neck and under his left eye, which were consistent with the officers' descriptions of what they say occurred when they took Abu-Jamal into custody. Prosecutor Joe McGill went so far during a pre-trial hearing as to borrow a billy club from an officer in the courtroom and ask Dr. Colletta if the injuries were consistent with what a billy club might do, and the doctor said, "I would think that instrument would do more injury." Moreover, a subsequent police brutality inquiry found no evidence of any such conduct.

Soon, Police Commissioner Mort Solomon arrived at the hospital, and later, so did Mayor William (Bill) Green. Green had replaced Frank L. Rizzo after he served two terms as mayor. Rizzo was, of course, the man who rose from patrolman to police commissioner. After he ran the city for eight years, he was prevented by the City Charter from seeking a third consecutive term. Mayor Green was appropriately solemn and compassionate. My interaction with Police Commissioner Solomon was not as staid as my discussion with Mayor Green. With regard to Commissioner Solomon, I became livid at the sight of the man who, to my mind then, was partly responsible for Danny's injury. See, Danny had recently complained to me about Commissioner Solomon's change in rules that governed the use of deadly force, restricting a police officer's ability to use a weapon. In "policespeak" they called it Police Directive 10, and it had gone into effect in 1980. At that minute, I did not yet know the circumstances surrounding Danny's shooting but found myself standing up to Solomon, holding his face, crying and saying to him, "You, with your deadly force restriction!" Too late, I realized I had unintentionally scratched his face. I was sorry immediately for my unrestrained emotion, which only added to the agony of us all that miserable night. I knew it was not so much the policy, but the confusion it caused when it went into effect, that caught the ire of cops like Danny. This was the first time deadly force was formalized into a directive. Initially there were a lot of questions and confusion on why it was being done. Police Directive 10 was viewed by the cops as limiting their ability to defend themselves. Danny had the perception that "our hands are being tied." In spelling out when they could or could not shoot, the general feeling was that there was no room for mistakes, and whoever made one would be in trouble. This was also the same time frame in which a less powerful bullet was adopted for use by the police department, which also had the guys riled up. That too was on my mind, given that Danny got off one shot on Abu-Jamal. Nevertheless, I was sorry, and remain sorry, for accidentally scratching the commissioner's face.

After this unexpected encounter that surprised even me, I was afraid I was losing control and returned to the private area where I could wait for news with Garry and Eddie. Danny's mom was then living with Danny's brother Ken; when the telephone rang to alert the Faulkners, Kenny had answered. They told him something had happened, that Danny had been shot. They did not want to tell him his condition but, when Kenny asked where he'd been shot, they told him "in the face." Kenny hadn't known it, but his mother had picked up an extension and when she heard the conversation, screamed in pain. Within minutes, other family members' phones were ringing with the news of Danny's predicament. Another brother, Pat, got his call from Kenny: "Danny's been shot, we don't know how bad, and we're all headed to Jefferson." Hoping for the best, Pat Faulkner jumped in his car for the twenty-minute ride to the hospital and tuned in to KYW Newsradio. He heard a report that the officer who had been shot was dead. Danny Faulkner was not named, but that's the way Pat learned of his baby brother's death. Imagine what it must have been like for him, driving alone in the middle of the night, racing to the hospital to see a dead brother.

At the hospital, his doctor soon walked in, wearing a white coat splattered with ominous patches of blood. I was seated with Garry Bell and Eddie McGrory. Nobody moved. He came directly over to me. I looked up as he quietly said, "I'm sorry, he's gone." That was it. He delivered the earth-shattering blow of my life, then turned away and left the room. It was about 5:00 a.m.

That's how I learned my relationship with Danny of 913 days, 396 of which we were married, was over. The horrors of the night had started with a knock and ended with a scream. I remember shrieking and crying and thinking I was in a nightmare, hoping I could be dreaming and it wasn't true. Then, my parents walked through the door and brought reality with them. It was the first time in my life I ever saw my dad, a hardened WWII vet, cry. In twenty-five years, I had never seen him break down, but I remember that he sat there with his head in his hands, his tears hitting the floor. We all-the Foley and Faulkner families-just sat in that anteroom and held hands and cried as my new world turned in slow motion.

They then asked me if I wanted to see Danny. I went to the door of the room where they had cleaned him up-and I remember seeing what seemed like a vision of him lying on the table. I wanted desperately to help him but I couldn't go near him. I was too scared. Still disbelieving, I guess. I thought that if I went near him, I would snap and lose all control. I was in a state of shock. Everybody was crying and I remember saying that I didn't want to go back home. By now it was daylight, so I went with Mom and Dad and spent the day with them at their place. My parents were in their bedroom, and I remember I was so devastated over losing my husband that I crawled in between my mom and dad and went to sleep. I was twenty-five years old, an adult, out in the world. I was married and I had started a new life with a husband I deeply loved. But when you have something so devastating happen to you, you just need to be with your parents.

The next day, I returned to the house Danny and I had shared in southwest Philadelphia. A steady procession of family and friends began to gather to grieve and comfort me, and each other. Suddenly, my ten-year-old nephew, Jimmy, shouted, "Look, Aunt Maureen, Uncle Danny's not dead, he's right here." For an instant, my heart raced. When I looked up, I saw Danny's good friend Thom Hoban in his Philadelphia police uniform, there to pay his respects. For just a split second, I actually entertained the thought that Danny had walked in. That's how crazy and in a state of shock I was in: I was willing to believe he was still alive a day after seeing his body in the hospital. I remember how difficult it was for me to see any man in a uniform after that.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from MURDERED BY MUMIA by Maureen Faulkner Michael A. Smerconish Copyright © 2008 by Maureen Faulkner and Michael A. Smerconish. Excerpted by permission.
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