Eddy Leonardo was a 48-year-old Hispanic male who lived in Doraville in DeKalb County and was killed in Roswell, Georgia, on February 1, 2020. Leonardo worked at and operated a check-cashing business inside Super Mercado Jalisco No. 6 at 10390 Alpharetta Street. Shortly before 1 p.m. that Saturday, Leonardo arrived at the supermarket carrying a substantial amount of cash for the business; a police report cited in local reporting placed the amount at approximately $50,000. Leonardo's young son was with him. A longtime friend later said Leonardo had grown up in the same city in the Dominican Republic and was well regarded among friends in metro Atlanta.
Investigators eventually reconstructed what appeared to be a coordinated robbery attempt that began well before Leonardo reached the supermarket. Leonardo had stopped at a bank in DeKalb County earlier in the day and later stopped for food. License-plate-reader data and surveillance footage showed a black Dodge Charger in the area of the bank, then near the restaurant where Leonardo stopped, and finally following Leonardo's truck toward the supermarket. About 15 minutes before the shooting, footage showed the Charger at the restaurant while Leonardo was there and then following his vehicle when he drove away. Prosecutors later said a security guard at the bank had allegedly alerted a mutual acquaintance that Leonardo had left carrying a large amount of money, information authorities believed helped set the robbery in motion. The later account did not name the security guard.
When Leonardo reached the supermarket parking lot, the Charger pulled in behind him. According to the evidence later described in court, Manvel Britton emerged from the passenger side, approached Leonardo and demanded that he drop the money. Leonardo refused, and the confrontation became physical. Britton then pulled a firearm and shot Leonardo once in the torso while Leonardo's 9-year-old son watched. Leonardo collapsed in the parking lot as the shooter returned to the passenger side of the Charger, which sped north on Alpharetta Highway. Officers responding to the armed-robbery call found Leonardo on the pavement and recovered a plastic bag containing a large amount of U.S. currency nearby. Emergency personnel transported Leonardo to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The getaway car quickly became central to the investigation. Police used license-plate-reader information to determine that the black Dodge Charger belonged to James Travious English. Surveillance evidence also captured the vehicle leaving the area, and investigators obtained English's cellphone records. According to the Georgia Supreme Court's later account of the investigation, the movements of English's phone mirrored the movements of the Charger on the day of the killing. Police arrested English on February 3. Early reports listed murder among his charges and variously described the robbery-related count as armed robbery or criminal attempt to commit armed robbery. Anthony Boyd was arrested on February 6 and charged with murder and criminal attempt to commit armed robbery. Manvel Britton was arrested on February 11, bringing the number of people taken into custody in the case to three.
The evidence connecting Britton to the Charger and to English grew stronger after police impounded and searched the vehicle. Britton's fingerprints were found inside it, and investigators learned that English's phone and Britton's phone had repeatedly communicated around the time of the killing. The later court record showed 27 attempted or completed calls between the two phones during an approximately 31-hour period surrounding the shooting. Fifteen of those calls took place before Leonardo was killed, and the completed calls before the shooting totaled more than 44 minutes. By the time Britton's prosecution reached the Georgia Supreme Court on a pretrial evidence issue, he faced a murder charge, four felony-murder counts, criminal attempt to commit armed robbery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and two counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
Britton's defense challenged the cellphone-location evidence and persuaded the trial court to suppress it. The trial judge concluded that the search-warrant affidavit contained a material problem in its description of the communications between Britton and English and also questioned a discrepancy involving the identity of the officer responsible for the affidavit. The State appealed. On May 16, 2023, the Supreme Court of Georgia reversed the suppression order, finding that the description of the communications was not shown to be false, that the affidavit provided a substantial basis for probable cause, and that the document sufficiently identified the officer who made the affidavit. The ruling returned the case for further proceedings with the challenged evidence no longer suppressed on those grounds.
Britton was ultimately brought to trial, where prosecutors relied on the surveillance trail, cellphone evidence, fingerprints from the Charger and eyewitness testimony, including testimony concerning what Leonardo's son saw. Prosecutors told the jury that Britton was the person who got out of the passenger side of the Charger, confronted Leonardo over the money and fired the fatal shot after Leonardo resisted. Britton was convicted of Leonardo's murder in 2025. Because Britton had five prior felony convictions, the sentencing consequences were severe: he received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole plus an additional 15 years. Leonardo's widow, Linsy Natareno-Arreaga, said after the conviction that justice had finally been served. As of the November 26, 2025 account of the case, Britton was pursuing post-trial litigation, including a motion for a new trial.
The investigation therefore produced three publicly reported arrests: James English, Anthony Boyd and Manvel Britton. English's ownership of the Charger and cellphone evidence made him a co-defendant in the court record; Boyd was arrested and accused of participating in the attempted armed robbery and killing; and Britton was ultimately identified by prosecutors as the gunman and convicted. The publicly accessible online material located for English and Boyd documents their arrests and murder-related charges but does not establish a later final trial result, guilty plea, dismissal, conviction or sentence for either of them, so no such outcome can be reliably stated. Britton's outcome is definitive at the trial level: conviction for Leonardo's killing and a sentence of life without parole plus 15 years, subject to the post-trial challenge reported after sentencing.
