His badge number is 4699. He was wearing it the morning he was murdered 25 years ago in the bleak frigid December darkness at 13th and Locust Sts. in the wee hours when all decent citizens were home asleep and the only commercial street traffic were hookers and milkmen. Thirteenth and Locust was still called "the strip" in those days, so named for the bust out bars and nudie joints clustered in the neighborhood.

Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner (above) was a 23-year-old newlywed. He like working last out, the midnight-to-eight shift, because it left his evenings free to play cop league softball on spring and summer evenings. He played for the Sixth District team out of 11th and Winter Sts., which along with the Center City's Ninth District on the west side of Broad Street, are known collectively as "Hollywood" in cop talk.

Faulkner died from a bullet to the brain shot from point blank range delivered by the man who had already shot him once in the back. Before he died, Faulkner fired a single shot from his service revolver, striking his murderer in the chest. And it is that bullet from a dead cop's gun that was the incontravertible evidence that convicted Mumia Abu Jamal of first degree murder.

On Saturday, the 25th anniversary of Daniel Faulkner's death, there was a memorial mass in his honor in South Philadelphia. On the same day there was a "Free Mumia" demonstration in Center City. After all these years, the meaning, if not the facts, of what happened on Dec. 9, 1981 is still disputed -- mostly by people in France. The farther you go from Philadelphia, the more support there is for Mumia.

Last winter my leather jacket was stolen off a chair not ten feet from where I was shooting darts in a Center City bar two blocks away from where Daniel Faulkner was shot. I discovered the theft almost immediately. There was nothing of real value in the jacket other than my car keys and a pewter lapel pin shaped like a Philadelphia police badge with the number 4699 and the words, "Daniel Faulkner Memorial Motorcycle Run 1999."

Ordinarily I would not call the police over such a small matter, but I did. The pin meant a lot to me and I figured that it would to a Philly cop, especially a cop from the Sixth District, where Daniel Faulkner's framed photograph looks down from the front wall where three shifts of cops line up for roll call every day. It wasn't the value of the jacket or the keys, but the pin, and I explained that to the officer who responded to the 911 call within a half hour. I just wanted it on the record. I wanted the police to keep their eyes open.

What shocked me, what distressed me, what depressed me, was that the responding officer had no idea who Daniel Faulkner was. I asked her how long she had been a police officer and she said eight years. But how could an eight-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department not know the name Daniel Faulkner? I've asked many cops that question. And you don't want to know their answer.