BY MAURICE WILLIAMS AND LEE OLESON
ORANGE, New Jersey - Some 300 people protested in front of
the police headquarters here April 22 in response to the
death of Earl Faison. The 27-year-old Black man died April
11, less than an hour after he was arrested as an alleged
suspect in the killing of a police officer. Faison's family
said the cops beat him to death.
"They took him away from us for no reason," Sagirah Williams, Faison's stepmother, told the protesters. "We can't let this die."
The cops claimed Faison collapsed and died while walking into an interrogation room. Orange police director Richard Conte reportedly said a patrolman sprayed Faison with mace during his arrest.
Faison's family has hired a pathologist for an independent autopsy. The dead man's father, Earl Williams, said he was shown a picture of the corpse at the county morgue April 12. "From the moment I saw the pictures, I knew he had been beaten to death," said Williams. His son's face was full of cuts, bruises, and was so swollen it looked as if "he was dragged by a truck."
Cops go on rampage
Faison was one of four Black men who have been arrested in
connection with the killing of Joyce Carnegie, a Black police
officer who was killed April 8 while allegedly investigating
a robbery scene. According to media reports, witnesses said
the killer of Carnegie was a bald Black man with a goatee.
The cops went on a rampage after hearing the report.
Terrance Everett, a 24-year-old warehouse worker, was the first person arrested in the manhunt. He spent six days in the Essex County jail before he was cleared. Masked cops, including state troopers, federal agents, Orange city cops, East Orange city cops, Essex County sheriff's deputies, and investigators from the prosecutors' office, burst into Everett's home to arrest him in the early morning April 10. The cops, armed with semiautomatic rifles, set off smoke bombs during the raid.
"They started kicking, spitting on me, punching me, and yelling at my family. One of them blew his nose on me," Everett said at an April 17 news conference in Newark. He said one cop struck him in the eye with a rifle butt and another kicked him in the face, chipping a tooth.
"I heard people clapping and cheering as if they had caught some kind of wild animal," said Everett's wife, Ebony.
Less than 24 hours after being arrested, Everett had passed two polygraph tests but "they repeatedly told me I failed," he added. Everett's statement that he had been with his wife in a restaurant at the time of the killing was ignored by police and Essex County prosecutors' office, until the store manager talked to the news media on April 15.
The day after brutalizing Everett, the cops arrested Earl Faison and James Coker. On April 17 the day after Everett's release, police picked up yet another suspect in the case, 25- year-old Condell Woodson of Orange. Woodson has been charged with the killing. Coker remains in jail on unrelated charges.
Marchers determined to get justice
At the April 22 demonstration in Orange of 300 people,
Earl Faison's family members urged protesters to continue
mobilizing in order to get out the truth about his death. "It
has to stop somewhere," said Earl Williams. "We need more
people to get involved, to bring this full circle."
"We want justice. We gotta keep marching," said Sagirah Williams. "All his boys where are you?" she asked, inquiring if they would fight for justice for their friend.
"Yeah," responded about 15 Black youth in the crowd.
Charles Peters, an auto worker with 26 years at the Ford plant in Edison, New Jersey, said, "I'm here to show my support and demand those who killed the young man be brought to justice. If you kill a cop you pay a price; they should pay a price too." Peters was among several people at the rally who said this was their first demonstration against police brutality. He volunteered to be a marshal at the next protest.
"What happened was not an accident," said Larry Hamm, a member of the Peoples' Organization for Progress in Newark, one of the organizers of the protest "We are not going to let this get swept under the rug."
Hamm announced a march against police brutality is planned for May 1 down Main Street in Orange.
The activists demanding justice for Faison have linked protests in New Jersey with demonstrations against the cop killing of Amadou Diallo in New York.
Other actions in New Jersey have protested state troopers' stopping, harassing, and arresting Blacks and other oppressed nationalities on the New Jersey Turnpike. It's a practice some describe as "racial profiling." Some 200 people marched April 23 from the turnpike to the state capital in Trenton.
Reflecting the mounting pressures from protest actions, New Jersey cops John Hogan and James Kenna were indicted April 19 for lying about the race of dozens of motorists they stopped on the highway and illegally searched, to make it appear that some of the Black drivers they had stopped were white. Last April, Hogan and Kenna fired 11 shots into a van carrying four unarmed Black and Latino young men, wounding three of them.