Still Mysterious: The Reasons for the Traffic Stop
But before we analyze Scanlan’s role and, even more importantly, the role played by the other main prosecution witness at Billy Cook’s March 29, 1982 trial for “Aggravated Assault,” we should wind back to the beginning in order to shed some light on an additional question.
Why was Mumia Abu-Jamal’s brother Billy Cook stopped by Officer Faulkner in the first place? There have been many reports in the past claiming that Cook approached the scene by driving in Southern direction on 13th Street, and was stopped for driving the wrong way on a one-way street when he reached the intersection of 13th and Locust.10
But judging from both the trial of Cook and the one of Abu-Jamal, there is no evidence for this, and the claim appears to be based on early press reports, which in turn appear to be based on a misinterpretation by police press speakers of the police radio tapes. According to the transcript of the tapes, a security guard at 13th and Walnut Street had seen “a small compact auto heading in the wrong direction, south on 13th from [sic, should read towards] Locust,” but that guard could name neither the type nor the color of the car, and of course much less the role it might have played in the events.11
That Cook was not stopped for driving the wrong way on 13th Street is also strongly supported by the fact that at Cook’s trial prosecutor Joseph McGill, the same Assistant District Attorney (ADA) who would just a little more than two months later play that very same role at Mumia Abu-Jamal’s trial, never charged Cook with that particular traffic violation.
Rather, McGill speculated that the reason for the stop had been the damaged wooden front and rear bumpers of Cook’s VW and the license plate of the car that was hanging on a slant.12 Why a police officer who was alone in his car would take the trouble to look into this during the dead of the night, ADA McGill did not say. At any rate, Judge Meyer Rose of the Municipal Court of Philadelphia, before whom the case was tried, finally declared the question irrelevant.13
So perhaps – pending any testimony from Billy Cook – we will never know. Be that as it may, what was important that night was not the traffic stop itself but the events that ensued, namely, an altercation involving Billy Cook and Officer Faulkner, the death of the officer, and the severe wounding of and the murder charge against Mumia Abu-Jamal. The first time these events were dealt with before a court was Billy Cooks trial for “Aggravated Assault.”
At that trial, the state’s contention was that Billy Cook had started it all through resisting Faulkner’s attempt to arrest him by punching him in the face. The officer, so the theory went, reacted by beating Billy with his police flashlight, upon which Abu-Jamal who was parked nearby with his taxicab, approached the scene, shot the officer in the back, straddled the officer who had fallen on his back on the sidewalk in front of 1234 Locust and shot him execution-style at point blank range, managing to get near-mortally wounded by a shot from the officer’s gun somewhere in between all this.14
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