Excerpt: ‘Murdered By Mumia’

Maureen Faulkner, the widow of the police officer infamously murdered in Philadelphia in 1981 by then-journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, writes about her anguish, grief and her attempts to bring closure to her husband’s murder more than 25 years later. The book is called "Murdered By Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain and Injustice." Here's an excerpt:

Chapter 2: The Knock

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.

Coming in and out of your life will never free me.
‘Cause I don’t need to touch you to feel you.
It’s real with you, I just can’t get you out of my mind.

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.”

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