What happened to Michael "Mikey" Fauntleroy Jr. 5 years ago in East Trenton?
TRENTON — For the past five years, almost everyone from East Trenton arrested for a serious crime that finds themselves in Trenton police's detective bureau is asked basically the same question.
"What happened to Mikey?"
They know the detectives are looking for information about Michael "Mikey" Fauntleroy Jr., but the question remains unanswered today.
The 25-year-old vanished from Hart Avenue five years ago last month, baffling police and his family. Extensive searches in the area found nothing. On paper, he's officially a missing person.
Now, though, his family and police detectives are ready to say publicly what the police suspected in March 2011, and his parents took years to accept.
Mikey was likely killed.
"At this point, I am a realist," Michael Fauntleroy Sr. said recently, sitting at a conference room table in the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office.
"It's hard for me to say, but I know my son is gone," Fauntleroy Sr. said. He could only get those words out in the past year or two, he said.
Mikey's mom, Joyce White, does not like to describe her son as dead, though. "It's not a word that I can use," she said.
Part of White clings to the missing, the absence, she said, because she and his loved ones really do not know what happened to him.
But part of her aligns herself with the other families of murder victims in the East Trenton neighborhood.
And she's upset that the East Trenton neighborhood — where she was born and raised - is not willing to cough up information that will lead to finding out what happened to her son.
"How can you in clear conscience hurt someone like that, and still go to sleep?" White asks. "It really bothers me."
If she were to find out today what happened to her son, "I don't think I am going to be surprised, but mad and hurt. I am hurt that nobody has said anything."
The Fauntleroy disappearance is one of the unsolved cases currently being re-examined by the Mercer County Homicide Task Force, in conjunction with the Trenton Police Department.
Investigators hope that someone now is in a position to move the case forward, which could lead to a monetary reward, even if it's only to find Mikey's body.
The Investigation
The Fauntleroy case is on Trenton police Lt. Chris Doyle's career bucket list. He would like to solve the case - much less find Fauntleroy — before he retires.
It's a professional goal, he says, but he wants it more for the parents. He wants to make a call to Fauntleroy Sr. and White with real news one day, instead of giving the same answer he's given almost every time they call for the past five years.
"My heart goes out the them," Doyle said. "I can't imagine."
Fauntleroy was last seen Feb. 24, 2011. He was living with his mom on East Trenton Avenue. He called his parents often, multiple times some days, and had three sisters, as well as two young children of his own.
When the calls stopped, they knew something was wrong.
Police searched for him, but then a few days later patrol officers called in detectives, led by Doyle, who hit the streets of East Trenton and learned that Fauntleroy Jr. was targeted, possibly due to a beef over drug sales.
And they also learned the story in the neighborhood was that Fauntleroy met a violent end. They did not learn exact details, Doyle said, but it was enough to be concerned. "It gave us a direction to go in," Doyle said, sitting at the same conference table.
So police organized several ground searches of East Trenton, aided by a National Guard helicopter above and had the city fire department search the Assunpink Creek.
Doyle says now the best theory was that Fauntleroy was possibly lured to the end of Hart Avenue, which dead ends at the creek. What's head shaking to police is that they never found anything. Not one iota of evidence, Doyle said.
"But we absolutely believe that foul play was involved," Doyle said.
Detectives ran down theories Fauntleroy was in Philadelphia, or left the area. None panned out.
They also searched houses in the area where Fauntleroy could have been killed, and never found any evidence in them.
Over the years, Doyle said he's offered some people who said they know about the case pretty good incentives to divulge any information. None took him up on it.
Doyle said he and detectives believe they know what group in the neighborhood might be involved, but declined to get into details.
East Trenton
Michael Fauntleroy Sr. and Joyce White are both from East Trenton, a neighborhood that is technically in the city's North Ward. But anyone form the streets that radiate from the intersection of North Olden and North Clinton avenues know its East Trenton.
After his son disappeared, Fauntleroy Sr. did his own investigating in the area. He is a former Trenton High School football coach who taught in the city for several years, and knows people.
He did not get the answers he was looking for.
White says it's an embarrassment that the East Trenton she grew up with — barbecues, block parties and people looking out for each other's children — have turned on her son.
It's embarrassing, she said. After her son went missing, she said she would walk out of her house and people gave her double takes, and "ghostly" stares.
"I am from East Trenton," she said. "It just amazes me that nobody will say anything."
"It really amazes me how well they have kept my son," White said, addressing the neighborhood as a whole. Sometimes she wants to say to people, ""I just don't understand, ya'll killed him."
"I don't know this new East Trenton where you hurt people's kids and you don't say anything," White said.
Doyle said because both parents are from the neighborhood, there might be a reverse embarrassment, and that residents might not want to admit that neighborhood residents killed their son.
"I think that may be part of it," Fauntleroy Sr. said.
The Unknown
Either way, White and Fauntleroy Sr. say they hope someone will dig deep and think of their pain.
"Unfortunately, this is going to have to come down to someone having a conscience," Fauntleroy Sr. said.
Fauntleroy Sr. said he and his son talked all the time, and were talking about him going back to landscaping school when he disappeared. "Then to lose your son," he says, his voice trailing off.
Both parents miss him badly, and it's compounded by the awful unanswered questions. Grieving is interrupted, and closure does not exist, they say.
"I am going through life," White says. "It has its good days and bad days."
While police investigate, the family continues to keep Mikey's name alive as best they can, although Fauntleroy Sr. White and her daughters have all moved out of the Trenton.
They hand out business cards with information about the case, maintain a website www.findmikey.com and White sends posters to Trenton churches seeking information.
"I miss my son an awful lot," White said.
Anyone with information with any unsolved homicide may call the Mercer County Homicide Task Force at (609) 989-6406, the Trenton Police confidential tip line at (609) 989-3663 or the Trenton Crime Stoppers tip line at (609) 278-8477.
Tips may also be sent by text labeled TCSTIPS to Trenton Crime Stoppers at 274637.
This is the second in an occasional series on unsolved killings in Mercer County.
Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@kevintshea. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.