Faison, a 27-year-old Black man who suffered from asthma, died within an hour of being taken into custody on April 11, 1999. He was one of several "suspects" rounded up and "interrogated" in a series of savage police operations carried out in the days following the April 8, 1999, killing of an Orange cop allegedly investigating a robbery.

Detective Keith Jackson described in detail, for the first time in open court, what happened prior to Faison’s death.

Two Orange cops threw Faison into the back of a squad car "like a rag doll," Jackson said, and beat him with their fists as he lay handcuffed and in the back seat. Next, they took him to a secluded stairwell in the station and robbed him. Then one officer, "with a smirk on his face" according to Jackson, sprayed Faison at point-blank range with a pepper gas canister.

Faison was pronounced dead by the time he arrived at a local hospital.

"From the moment I saw the pictures" at the morgue, Earl Williams, Faison’s father, told the Militant at the time, "I knew he had been beaten to death." His son’s face was full of cuts and bruises, he said, and was so swollen that it looked as if "he was dragged by a truck."

Despite widespread and continuing protests, no criminal charges have ever been brought against the five cops--four white, one Black--who beat and sprayed Faison. They are being tried now solely on federal charges of violating his civil rights.

This is truly an outrage, said Williams, at a break in testimony. "Everybody knows that what they did was a criminal act, and they just lied about it."

Andrea Puryear, a student at Essex Community College attending the trial, agreed. "Those cops should be on trial for murder," she said, just like the ones who killed her 20-year-old nephew, Sharif Alston, in East Orange in 1996. The cops claimed he was attacking them in a stolen car, she said, but he was "shot in the back." No one was ever charged in the case.

Meanwhile, just hours prior to the trial testimony in the Faison case, 31-year-old Mitchel Spero died en route to a Newark hospital after being pepper-sprayed by cops in nearby Monroe Township. Spero, cops claimed, had been causing a "disturbance" outside a volunteer fire station.  
 
 
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