Tara Louise Baker looked beyond people’s flaws.
In a sense, she was innocent to think everyone always had good intentions. It’s one of the qualities that those around her liked the most, her former Milledgeville college roommate said.
“She saw the best in people and she always tried to help people. She was very much somebody for the underdog,” Kristen McCrackin, who got her bachelor’s degree alongside Baker from Georgia College & State University, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tuesday.
Not a day has gone by that McCrackin hasn’t thought about Baker. She worried at times that the man responsible for her friend’s 2001 death in Athens would never be caught. She told herself the cold case maybe just wasn’t meant to be solved.
Last week, McCrackin was finally able to look at the suspect’s face. She said she has since spent a lot of time staring at Edrick Lamont Faust’s mug shot.
Faust, a 48-year-old Athens man with a lengthy criminal history, was charged with murder, aggravated assault, concealing the death of another, arson, possession of a knife during the commission of a felony, tampering with evidence and aggravated sodomy. He became a suspect in Baker’s death in late April and is accused of attacking and sexually assaulting her before setting her rental home on fire on Jan. 19, 2001, GBI Director Chris Hosey said during a news conference Monday.
The incident happened a day before Baker, a University of Georgia law student at the time, turned 24 years old. Faust was 25.
A few years earlier, Baker and McCrackin had studied together at GCSU and were roommates at the Alpha Delta Pi house on the Middle Georgia campus in 1996. The girls, who were from Lovejoy and Macon, had plenty in common when they met at 19 and 18 years old as Baker was trying to join the sorority. They were both political junkies, proud of their Southern heritage and vegetarians, McCrackin said with a giggle.
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
By 2001, they had drifted apart. Baker was a first-year law student at UGA and McCrackin, who now works as a freelance journalist and adjunct instructor at Helms College, was starting her career.
McCrackin still remembers the conversation she had with a sorority sister when she was told about the killing. Recounting the somber conversation brought her to tears, and she distinctly recalled not immediately believing the news was real.
She wishes she would have kept up with Baker more after college. She sometimes wonders why she didn’t just pick up the phone and give her a call.
“When you’re young like that, you think there’s time. You think there’s plenty of time to get back in touch. ... It didn’t seem like it had been that long until she was gone. And then there was no opportunity ever again,” McCrackin said.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The death deeply impacted McCrackin, who described it as the first time in her life she felt afraid. For a few years, she said she would not go into her apartment by herself or go out alone. Even today, at 48 years old, she said she does not let people into her house or even open the door when she is by herself.
The killing was particularly shocking because Baker was kind to everyone she met, McCrackin said. She had a way with people and instantly drew strangers in, making them feel welcome. At GCSU, you wouldn’t have met a person who didn’t like Baker, her friend emphasized.
“Of all the people that it could have happened to, this was just so wrong that it happened to her, because she would have given that man anything he wanted. She would have done anything she could to help him,” McCrackin said. “He didn’t have to do those things to her.”
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
The GBI and the Athens-Clarke County Police Department began reviewing evidence in Baker’s case in September. Then, interest rose again in February after the death of nursing student Laken Riley, who was killed near UGA’s intramural fields. A 26-year-old man, Jose Antonio Ibarra, was recently indicted in that case on charges that include murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault with intent to rape and kidnapping.
In April 2023, Gov. Brian Kemp signed the Coleman-Baker Act, which allows families to request that law enforcement agencies review and reinvestigate cold homicide cases. It provided $5.4 million toward establishing a unit dedicated to solving the cases within the GBI and was named after Baker and Rhonda Coleman, an 18-year-old woman who was killed in Hazlehurst in 1990.
McCrackin said she is glad the new legislation will help others in the same situation gain some closure.
Even with an arrest and some questions answered as to what happened the day of Baker’s killing, McCrackin acknowledged there is still a long way to go before she, her sorority sisters and Baker’s family can feel at peace.
“For many years, we just wanted to know who would do something like this,” she said. “Now we at least know who, but what’s left is the why. Why would he do something like this?”
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