Defense provides graphic account of UGA law student’s murder in new court filing

By Joe Johnson

With the Tara Baker murder trial just a week away, an attorney for the accused killer has provided the most detailed account to date of the UGA law school student’s death 25 years ago.

The details are meant to contrast the slaying with an assault that Edrick Faust was previously convicted of committing that the prosecution plans to present as evidence in the trial that’s scheduled to start next Monday.

Faust was convicted of aggravated assault for an incident on February 4th, 2001, in which he stabbed a man in the neck during an altercation in a Baxter Street bar.

It was only several weeks earlier, on January 19th, that Baker was brutally murdered in her apartment in the eastside Deer Park neighborhood.

Defense attorney Ahmad R. Crews filed a motion to bar testimony about the bar fight from the murder trial.

“It is a stretch to find similarities between the two offenses that does not denigrate and belittle the severity and gravity of the circumstances surrounding Ms. Baker’s death,” the defense attorney states.

The motion presents facts about the 23-year-old student’s death that had never before been made public.

“The facts on Ms. Baker’s death are that an extremely enraged individual, not Mr. Faust, brutally beat Ms. Baker until her eyes were blackened and her face was swollen.

“He then proceeded to strangle her with her printer cord, stab her in the right side of the neck, and sexually assault her in painful and demeaning ways.

“Then while Ms. Baker laid on the ground, alive but dying, said individual then took a blanket from the living room, set it on the stove until it caught ablaze, then placed it on Ms. Baker’s bed and closed and locked her bedroom and bathroom door as she was dying as a final means of intensifying her suffering, showing a true disregard for her pain, and even more, her humanity.

“Said assailant then took his time to wipe down Ms. Baker’s home before leaving with one personal item, her laptop and all of her laptop documents from her filing cabinet.

“Ms. Baker’s death was drawn in an incredibly long and brutal fashion, with a focus on intensifying her pain and tormenting her using a variety of excruciating methods to truly cause her final moments to be agony.”

Faust was arrested in May of last year and subsequently indicted for malice and felony murder, rape, aggravated sodomy, arson, and other crimes associated with Baker’s death.

Now 50, Faust had lived just a couple blocks away from Baker’s apartment on Fawn Drive.

The indictment alleges that he broke into Baker’s home and killed her by stabbing her with a knife and strangling her with a cord. He also allegedly raped and sodomized Baker and set fire to her apartment in an attempt to conceal his crimes.

The crime went unsolved for two decades, until when in February of last year Faust was identified as the suspect by matching his DNA to genetic evidence collected from Baker at her autopsy.

His DNA had been entered into the FBI’s national database upon entering the Georgia prison system in May 2001 after being convicted of crimes unrelated to the murder.

Jury selection for the trial begins Monday morning in the Athens-Clarke County Courthouse on East Washington Street.