District attorney issues release on prosecution of Baker murder case

Western Judicial Circuit District Attorney Kalki Yalamanchili today issued the following

A jury of Athens-Clarke County residents returned a guilty verdict on February 17th, 2026, holding Edrick Lamont Faust accountable for his murder and sexual assault of Tara Baker on January 19th, 2001.  The jury found the defendant guilty of Malice Murder, Felony Murder, Rape, Aggravated Sodomy, Burglary, Aggravated Assault, Arson, and Possession of a Knife During Commission of a Felony.  The Defendant was sentenced on February 19th, 2026 to two consecutive life sentences followed by an additional 45 years in confinement. 

For more than two decades, Tara Baker’s case remained unsolved, but she was never forgotten.  Through continued investigative efforts, collaboration of law enforcement on the local, state, and federal level, advancements in DNA analysis technologies, and her family’s determination to see justice, Tara’s murderer was identified and held accountable.   

We thank our state government for providing the resources to create the GBI cold case unit to help families who suffer loss without answers.  This conviction represents the unwavering commitment of our community, law enforcement, and the District Attorney’s Office for the Western Judicial Circuit to pursue justice no matter how much time has passed.  We recognize and thank all of the law enforcement professionals who worked on this case over the past quarter century. 

Our prayers and deepest condolences continue to be with Tara’s family.  We recognize that there is nothing that any of us can do to take away the pain and sorrow of her loss, but we hope that some small measure of comfort is provided by holding her murderer accountable. 

For those who may want credible information about the evidence in this case, please see the following information compiled by someone with extensive knowledge of this case: 

In January 2001, Tara Baker, a first-year law student at the University of Georgia, was found murdered inside her Athens off-campus home under circumstances that immediately signaled a crime of extraordinary brutality. The scene bore the hallmarks of a violent sexual assault followed by a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence through fire. Investigators confronted a case both horrifying and perplexing: a young woman attacked in her own home and a community shaken by the brutality of the violence. Despite extensive investigative efforts, the case resisted resolution for decades, evolving into one of Athens’ most enduring and closely scrutinized 

homicide investigations, sustained by advances in forensic science, persistent evidentiary review, and the refusal of investigators to accept that the passage of time would foreclose justice. 

On February 17th, 2026, Edrick Faust was convicted of the rape and murder of Tara Baker, a crime that haunted Athens for twenty-five years. Within hours, social media and media commentators began recycling a familiar refrain: that the verdict was unjust, that reasonable doubt demanded acquittal, that the prosecution somehow overreached. 

Such claims collapse under even modest scrutiny. 

To accept them, one must either misunderstand the evidence or ignore it entirely. 

I spent fifteen years working on this investigation. The case file spans tens of thousands of documents, countless interviews, and an evidentiary record built patiently across decades. I do not speak as a distant observer or armchair analyst. I speak from prolonged, direct engagement with the facts. 

Courtrooms, unlike digital platforms, are engineered to remove distortion. The benches are hard, the lighting clinical, the procedures governed by rules designed to privilege accuracy over emotion. Trials are not spectacles. They are structured tests of reliability. Claims survive only if supported by admissible evidence. Doubt must be reasonable, not hypothetical or theatrically imagined. 

The Faust trial adhered to that discipline. 

At the center of the prosecution’s case stood forensic science, whose authority derives precisely from its indifference to opinion. DNA evidence does not persuade through narrative. It operates through statistical inference and population genetics. It calculates. It has no implicit bias, it is not racist. 

In 2024, CODIS, a national database of known criminal DNA profiles, alerted investigators to a match identifying Faust’s DNA on the vaginal and oral swabs collected during Baker’s autopsy. Prior to that database hit, Faust had never been a suspect. Faust lived approximately 600 feet 

from Baker’s back door at the time of her murder and rape. When interviewed, Faust denied knowing Tara Baker at all. 

The significance of the match cannot be overstated, Faust’s DNA was found in Baker’s vagina and mouth. Jurors were presented with probabilities expressed in magnitudes so vast they resist intuitive comprehension. These figures are not rhetorical embellishments. They are mathematical descriptions of rarity, quantifying how extraordinarily unlikely it would be for the observed genetic profile to belong to anyone else. 

In legal terms, such statistics dramatically constrict the universe of plausible alternatives. 

They do not eliminate imagination. They eliminate reasonable counter-explanations. 

When confronted with the DNA evidence, Faust did not offer an innocent explanation for its presence. He did not express confusion or attempt reconciliation with prior statements. Instead, upon learning of the match, his response was stark and immediate: “Take me to jail.” 

Jurors heard this in his own recorded voice. 

Recorded interviews possess a uniquely unforgiving evidentiary quality. They are not filtered through recollection or advocacy. Tone, cadence, hesitation, and phrasing remain intact. The jury evaluates what was actually said, not what competing narratives later claim was meant. 

One immutable fact remained: there was no credible evidence that Faust and Baker knew one another in any context. In that reality, the presence of Faust’s DNA inside Baker’s body is not a curiosity. It is a profoundly incriminating physical finding. 

Common sense aligns comfortably with forensic science here. Absent prior contact, such a result demands explanation. None emerged. 

The defense advanced no explanation for Faust’s DNA; rather, they presented an alternative theory: that Baker’s long-time boyfriend committed the crime. The boyfriend’s DNA, the defense emphasized, was also detected on elements of the rape kit. 

But DNA findings exist within biological and temporal contexts. The boyfriend had acknowledged consensual sexual contact with Baker days before her death, a statement consistent with well-established principles of DNA persistence. The presence of his genetic material, therefore, was neither surprising nor inculpatory. 

More critically, the evidentiary record placed him elsewhere at the time of the murder. 

Multiple witnesses corroborated his alibi. Even more decisively, a bank surveillance camera captured him conducting a transaction approximately an hour away during the estimated window of Baker’s rape and killing. Unlike human memory, the camera possessed no bias, no interpretive lens, no susceptibility to suggestion. 

It simply recorded. 

Speculation cannot survive collision with documented, time-stamped reality. 

Social media is not a venue for adjudication. It is an engine of amplification governed by incentives fundamentally misaligned with evidentiary reasoning. Algorithms reward engagement, not accuracy. Confidence, not calibration. Fragments, not synthesis. 

Testimony becomes clips. Complex forensic evidence becomes slogans. Assertions circulate without cross-examination, admissibility standards, or methodological scrutiny. Expertise and conjecture appear visually indistinguishable to audiences consuming information at speed. 

The result is not analysis. It is distortion. 

Within hours of any high-profile verdict, feeds populate with emphatic conclusions from commentators who neither observed the full proceedings nor engaged the evidentiary record in its entirety. Probabilities are trivialized. Context evaporates. Isolated details are inflated into false significance. 

Echo chambers transform repetition into perceived truth. 

None of this alters the function of a jury. 

Jurors operate under a radically different framework. They are instructed to disregard what was not admitted, to distinguish advocacy from proof, and to ground conclusions exclusively in evidence subjected to procedural safeguards. Their deliberations unfold not in bursts of outrage but through structured evaluation. 

In the Faust trial, that process produced a unanimous conviction across all counts. 

The verdict was not an emotional reflex. It was the endpoint of disciplined reasoning applied to forensic findings, physical evidence, recorded statements, and corroborated timelines. Reasonable doubt was not dismissed. It was measured. And it failed. 

This is the defining tension of modern justice. Verdicts rendered through rigorous procedural standards are immediately re-litigated in environments designed for neither rigor nor standards. Digital discourse generates heat, velocity, and certainty, but it does not replicate the architecture of reliability that governs courts of law. 

Legitimacy does not flow from volume. It flows from process. 

Justice is not crowdsourced. It does not emerge from trending sentiment or viral fragments. It is forged through the deliberate scrutiny of admissible evidence under rules designed to filter reliability from conjecture. 

In that courtroom, probability, biology, physical findings, and recorded words converged into a conclusion the jury found extinguished reasonable doubt. 

Beyond the courthouse, noise will continue its restless churn. But the verdict was rendered where truth is tested rather than amplified.