Veronica & The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal: as told to her sister Valerie Jones

By Valerie Jones

Sometimes raw, always vivid and forthright, this is the life story of Veronica Jones, a witness in the murder trial of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. She saw two other men run from the scene of the shooting death of police officer Daniel Faulkner—she was a witness for Mumia´s innocence. Unbeknownst to anyone but her younger sister, Veronica’s life was also entwined with Faulkner’s.

Before she could testify, police detectives threatened her with 10-15 years in prison and separation from her young children if she did not falsely name Mumia as the shooter. At Mumia´s trial she recanted her original and true witness statement and denied that she saw anyone run from the scene. This gave the prosecution evidence for conviction.

In 1996 when Veronica courageously came forward to redeem herself and correct a fourteen year old lie, notorious Judge Albert Sabo, “king of death row,” and the prosecution retaliated and had her handcuffed and arrested off the witness stand!

With intimidation tactics like this in an open courtroom, one can only imagine what happens behind closed doors....

This story of a courageous women also contains a Forward and Commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal and a Legal Afterword by attorney Rachel Wolkenstein on the legal significance of Veronica’s testimony.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477154373

Valerie Jones

Valerie is the mother of two adult children. She finds fulfillment and enjoyment in reading and staying abreast of current and social issues, writing, spending time with family, quiet walks in parks, listening to music, attending plays and traveling. In the last several years (other than her children) the most meaningful use of her time has entailed finishing what her big sister Veronica Jones started—an account of her life and her involvement in the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Valerie makes her home in New Jersey,

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Copyright © 2012 by Valerie Jones.

Veronica & the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal

©2012 Valerie Jones

©2012 Forward by Mumia Abu-Jamal

©1996 Fugitive from Injustice by Mumia Abu-Jamal

©2012 Afterword by Rachel Wolkenstein

Front cover photo: ©1996 John Edginton from

Mumia Abu Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?

©Courtroom drawings by Susan Schary. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

Reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

First Edition 2012

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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119363

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Forward by Mumia Abu-Jamal

Introduction

There’s a lot I have to say

The Early Years

Mesmerized by Philadelphia

Street life is not a game

Veronica and Police Officer Daniel Faulkner

Assault and Rape

December 9, 1981: 12th and Locust

December 15, 1981: The Police Interview

January 1982: Lucky didn’t get pulled in like the rest of you

June 1982: We may be able to help you out

The Trial: I was afraid for my kids, I was afraid of going to prison

Fleeing New Jersey

I wanted to make it right

October 1, 1996: Arrested for Telling the Truth

I’m still here in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal

I believe Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent

Fugitive From Injustice

On the Legal Significance of Veronica Jones’ Testimony

Endnotes

Appendix

About the Author

To Ronnie:

We love you, always and forever.

Acknowledgements 

To my family: My mother, Shirley Mae who kept everything and everyone together through thick and thin, my sister Leslie, brother Hubert, daughter Jessica, son, nieces and nephews. To Veronica’s daughters (Sherri, Tiffany and Kiyra), your mother loved you all and her grandchildren so very much.

Rachel Wolkenstein, for all your hard work, persistence, diligence and for providing legal background in addition to your legal afterword to this project.

Mark Lance, who brought to this work his wonderful editing talents.

Gary Mueller, for supplying extensive research and being such a creative resource to this work.

Pam Africa, thank you for always being a phone call away and a source of strength for Veronica for so many years.

Forward by Mumia Abu-Jamal 

A trial is an odd thing.

When you think about it, in most cases, the witness stand is filled with strangers—people whom you’ve never seen, and who may’ve never seen you.

Why they are testifying is often more important a question than what they are testifying about. And the motivations can be as varied as life itself, and it may take years to discern. As people are learning every day, some witnesses are forced to testify in order to escape (or have leniency granted) for a pending criminal case.

I didn’t know the woman, Veronica Jones, who testified at my trial on June 29, 1982. But the look on her face denoted her surprise and confusion. She radiated a vibration that she didn’t want to be there.

It would be years before we learned why. She was black-mailed with the threat of prison and a mother’s ultimate fear—separation from her babies!—to get her on the stand.

And still she did not fold. She did not say what the government wanted her to say. In spite of ungodly pressures.

What courage!

She fought back in the only way she could—Veronica Jones resisted.

I did not know the slender, brown woman on the stand, beyond name, supposed profession, age, address.

But I wish I did. I wish I could’ve hugged her.

I would’ve told her how proud I was of her, her spirit, her fire.

But I never had the chance.

When you read her words, I bet you’ll want to hug her too.

For she was a remarkable woman, who fought many battles in her life; losing some, but fighting still.

Let this work, blessed into being by her loving sister, Valerie, be her testament.

When next you see a news article describing someone’s life, think of this book, and Veronica Jones’ life, and you’ll know how little you know.

Thank you, Veronica.

With belated love,

Mumia Abu-Jamal 6/25/2012

Introduction 

I went down under the High Speed Line, waited a few and came

back up again. Then I ran over to Nick’s Roast Beef which was on

Walnut Street, picked up a pay phone and dialed 911.

911. What’s your emergency?

A policeman’s just been shot on 13th and Locust.

Someone has just been shot at 13th and Locust?

Yes.

Your name?

Click.

I used my jacket to wipe off my fingerprints.

My name is Valerie Jones. My older sister, Veronica, made that phone call in Philadelphia at about 3:55 a.m. on December 9, 1981. The mortally wounded victim was police officer Daniel Faulkner. The man accused of the shooting was Mumia Abu-Jamal, a well-known, black radio journalist. At the time of the shooting, my sister, who we called Ronnie, didn’t know the identity of the policeman and had no association with the alleged shooter. Her future, however, was about to become closely tied to Mumia’s. Ronnie’s past was already intimately entwined with Faulkner’s.

Ronnie was called as a witness for the defense at the 1982 trial where Mumia, a former Black Panther and MOVE supporter, was convicted and sentenced to death. In a statement to Philadelphia detectives a week after the shooting, Ronnie said she saw two men run from the scene. But at the trial, she surprised the defense by denying that fact. At a 1996 Pennsylvania state court hearing challenging Mumia’s conviction Ronnie testified again. She admitted that she had lied at the 1982 trial because police threatened her with five to fifteen years in prison unless she said that Mumia shot Faulkner. Ronnie testified that she had seen men run from the scene and that the prosecution’s star witness, prostitute Cynthia White (aka Lucky) had been given a deal to say that Mumia shot Faulkner. The prosecution’s response to Ronnie’s testimony was to arrest her from the witness stand in the middle of the hearing!

In 2001, Mumia’s death sentence was overturned by a federal court judge, but it took two federal appeals court decisions and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court over ten years before the Philadelphia District Attorney gave up trying to have Mumia executed. Now Mumia faces the slow death of life imprisonment.

From December 2006 through early 2007, Ronnie was in Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J. A serious infection led to a two-month coma. She resolved afterward to tell her story, motivated chiefly by her hope that Mumia might get a new trial and her testimony could contribute to the efforts to win his freedom. I promised to help and during her final two years, I dutifully (and tearfully) took down Ronnie’s account of her often-troubled life. She was determined to tell the whole story: for herself, for her family and above all, for an innocent man on death row. She believed, as I do, that Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty of nothing except surviving that night and her own experience points to a deliberate police frame-up.

My sister was, like most people, multifaceted and complex. She was very smart, strong, caring, extremely funny and fun-loving. Ronnie had a very large heart and loved her daughters intensely. But at times, she was prone to getting into trouble. Her true nature, combined with her experiences, shaped who she came to be as her life’s journey unfolded.

My sister was the first to admit that she made a lot of mistakes in her life. Most were inwardly directed. But those affecting others, she did her best to make right. Often this was at great cost to herself as in 1996 when her internal moral compass refused to allow her to live a lie. Ronnie was the most courageous person I have ever known and I’m proud to call her my sister.

Ronnie died on December 1, 2009. She was 48. In her own words, this is her story.

There’s a lot I have to say 

As I lay in a coma for two months in early 2007, I could hear the voices around me. My daughters, my sisters, brother, niece and nephew, I even heard the voices of nurses, doctors, technicians, the janitorial staff. I heard them all. But of all the noise, the sound that was constant was the beep of the vital-sign machine. I could sense my life just dangling in the wind, hanging by a thread. Folks were standing over me speaking of my demise. I wanted to say to them all, Damn it. I can hear you. Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!

My mind spoke but my body couldn’t. All I knew was that I wanted to live. I did not want to die, not like this. There’s a lot I want to do and say and have wanted to do and say for years.

The Early Years 

In 1972, we lived in Yonkers, New York. It was a good time for Ronnie. She took ballet classes and her teachers said she was pretty good. But as Ronnie got a little older, her interest shifted from dancing to sports. She was a superfast runner; our dad encouraged her to try out for the track team at Martin Luther King Junior High School. Ronnie made the team.

Track was my life. I ate track. I slept track. All I knew was track. When we had meets, my mom, sisters and brother would be in the stands and my dad would be at the finish line. The coach made me the anchor because he knew I would bring it home.

One summer I was scheduled to race at Yankee Stadium. They told me I had a shot to make the Junior Olympics. I’ll never forget it. There was only one girl who even came close to my speed. Every summer my siblings and I went to West Virginia to spend time with my grandparents. This particular summer I begged my parents not to send me, but in the end I had to go. The one that won that race was the very girl from my own team who could never beat me. Not long after the most important track meet of my life did not happen, the apartment building we lived in caught fire and burned up everything we owned. All we had left was our car. So we piled into my parents’ Thunderbird and headed for Camden, New Jersey where my father’s recently deceased mother had lived. Her home became our home.

Ronnie had two devastating experiences in Camden. First, she was sexually molested when she was 13. I remember her coming up to our bedroom in tears many times. She wouldn’t say what was wrong. I would tell my big sister not to cry. It wasn’t until we started this project that I learned the entire terrible truth.

The second crushing blow was learning that our dad was not her biological father:

I had a very vindictive cousin. One day when my sisters and I were sitting on our front steps, she walked up with this sinister smirk on her face. She had no conversation for me other than to say, You still don’t know, do you?

Don’t know what? What are you talking about?

Uncle Sammy!

And?

Uncle Sammy AIN’T your real dad! The others are his, but you—you’re not. You’re not his daughter.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. But considering her gloating, I knew she was telling the truth.

In a flash, my world came crashing down on me. I felt deceived, like damaged goods. My head began to throb. I became dizzy and nauseated. My heart had been broken and shattered into a million pieces. And in the midst of all this pain the only thing I could see clear was the look on my cousin’s face. She looked like Satan himself. She just stood there—with that smirk pasted on her face enjoying my pain. A piece of information that took less than a minute to tell changed my attitude and the whole direction of my life. The power to actually destroy someone with words, in less than a minute.

Back in Yonkers, when