GA v. Edrick Faust

Edrick Lamont Faust stood trial in Athens, Georgia, charged in the killing of Tara Baker, a first-year University of Georgia law student found dead inside her burning apartment on January 19, 2001, one day before her 24th birthday. A Clarke County grand jury returned a twelve-count indictment: malice murder, four counts of felony murder, rape, two counts of aggravated sodomy, aggravated assault, arson, possession of a knife during the commission of a felony, and tampering with evidence. The State alleged that Faust, who lived barely a block from Baker in the Deer Park neighborhood, beat, strangled, stabbed, and sexually assaulted her, then set fire to her apartment to destroy the evidence and took her laptop before leaving. Investigators have said they do not believe the two knew each other.

For twenty-three years the case sat unsolved. The trial centered on what finally broke it open: DNA. Investigators had collected biological evidence during Baker's 2001 autopsy, and a GBI Cold Case Unit, created under the Coleman-Baker Act named partly for Tara herself, reexamined it using a computer program called TrueAllele that analyzes mixed genetic samples. The State said that analysis matched Faust, whose profile had entered the national CODIS database when he went to prison on unrelated charges in 2001. The defense, led by attorney Ahmad Crews, fought that evidence at every turn, questioning whether degraded material from decades earlier could be trusted and arguing outright that someone else was the killer. Prosecutors also sought to put a separate 2001 stabbing before the jury, while the defense pressed questions about case access, judicial fairness, and the sheer volume of a file that ran past 25,000 documents.

Justice Is A Process watched this trial because a cold case built on decades-old science tests everything the system claims to stand for: the burden of proof, the presumption of innocence, and a defendant's right to answer the evidence against him. Faust pleaded not guilty, and it was the State's job to prove each count beyond a reasonable doubt, not his job to prove anything. We tracked the DNA fight, the evidentiary rulings, and the testimony without deciding the outcome ahead of the jury. The full coverage below walks through how the case unfolded day by day, and how it was resolved.