The next thing we know is that at 3:51:08, Officer Faulkner made a call on the police radio:
RPC [Faulkner]: 612.
Radio: 12.
Faulkner: I have a car stopped – ah – 12, 13th and Locust.
Radio: Car to back 612, 13th and Locust.
Faulkner: On second thought, send me a wagon, 1234 Locust.
Radio: 601.
EPW: Yeah [6]01 okay, 1234 Locust.3
According to an analysis of the tape of the police radio carried out in 1999, the dialogue between Faulkner and dispatcher Reginald Thomson took about 13-15 seconds to complete.4 19 seconds after the original call, at 3:51:27, Emergency Patrol Wagon (EPW) 601 of Officers Steven Trombetta and Gary Wakshul5 was assigned for backup, following Faulkner’s call for a wagon.6
Exactly one minute later, at 3:52:27, Wakshul and Trombetta, who for unexplained reasons still had not left their original location at the intersection of Juniper and Walnut Street to provide backup for Faulkner, were on the radio again, with very bad news for the dispatcher: “We just got information from a passerby, there’s a policeman shot, I think it sounds like it was at 12[th].”7 Uncontested testimony before and at Mumia Abu-Jamal’s June/July 1982 trial shows that the “passerby” they were talking about was a motorist called Michael Scanlan8 who had traveled three blocks with his Ford Thunderbird9 in order to look for help from the police. Given the time he needed for that distance and the time it took the officers to get on the radio, the events this witness later claimed to have observed in gruesome detail cannot have taken place later than 3:52, i.e. some 35 seconds after Faulkner completed his radio call for backup by requesting a van.
Whatever the exact time was, the first witness to the events, Michael Scanlan, was to play a pivotal role at the respective trials of both Billy Cook and his brother Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
