In the warm evening of August 7, 2022, a sense of community and recreation at Rosa L. Burney Park in Atlanta was shattered by sudden violence. During a baseball or softball game, an argument escalated, leading to a burst of gunfire that left chaos and tragedy in its wake. Among the victims was Rashad Rogers, a 31-year-old male. He, along with 33-year-old April Sparks, was fatally wounded in the shooting.
The senseless act of violence also left four other people injured, including a 6-year-old girl who was reported to be in critical condition. In the aftermath, friends of Rogers remembered him as a father whose children would deeply miss him. Atlanta police began an investigation into the shooting, releasing photographs of a person of interest to the public. As of August 2023, the case remained under investigation, with authorities renewing a push for information from the community to help bring those responsible to justice.
A separate and unrelated case involves another Rashad Rogers from the Atlanta area. This individual, a 33-year-old male from Forest Park, was convicted by a jury in June 2024 for a murder that took place over a decade earlier. On December 18, 2010, two men wearing surgical masks entered a Church's Chicken on Flakes Mill Road in DeKalb County with the intent to rob the establishment. During the robbery, Gary Andrews, a 23-year-old employee, was attempting to hide his coworkers in a freezer for their safety. When Andrews intervened as one of the robbers held a gun to another employee's head, he was shot twice and killed.
The case went cold for a period of time until the DeKalb County Police Department's Cold Case Unit picked it up in 2012. The investigation gained momentum when the FBI, while investigating a separate bank robbery, received a tip from an informant. The informant linked Rashad Rogers and two other men, Clifford Jackson and Clifford Durham, to the murder at the fast-food restaurant. The informant recounted that the men had a large amount of money on the night of the murder and overheard Rogers saying, 'He shouldn't have moved, I had to do it.' In October 2013, murder warrants were issued for Rogers and Jackson. In June 2024, Clifford Jackson pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Following a jury trial, Rashad Rogers was found guilty of malice murder and felony murder and was sentenced to life in prison for the death of Gary Andrews.
