Sarfaraz Sharif Khan, a 57-year-old South Asian man, was gunned down in the dark early hours of February 7, 2016, outside his Eastside Grocery on East 8th Avenue in Cordele, Georgia, in what authorities and later court records described as an armed robbery that turned deadly. He had stayed late to close up, and two employees, Lynda Rowe and her son Otis Rowe, were there helping lock the store. While Khan was outside picking up trash in the parking lot, a man came around the corner with a white T-shirt wrapped over his face and a gun in his hand. Witnesses heard the command “Don’t move,” and then the gunfire started, shattering the quiet of the lot as Khan tried to run and then drew his own weapon.
What followed was fast, violent, and chaotic. Surveillance footage and witness testimony later described the gunman rushing toward Khan and firing as Khan fled. The two men collided and fell to the ground, where more shots were fired in a struggle at close range. Khan was hit three times, including a wound to the chest, and when rescuers reached him he was face down, without a detectable pulse, taking only a few gasping breaths before he stopped breathing altogether. He was taken for medical care but did not survive. Investigators recovered cartridge casings from both weapons, and muddy shoeprints along a narrow path beside the store suggested the attacker had approached from the side before bursting into the parking lot.
There was an arrest almost immediately because the suspected gunman never made it away. One of the men at the scene, later identified as Marquerius Dandre Carter, was found there with a gunshot wound to the leg. According to the evidence later laid out in court, Khan’s employees moved in after the shooting, got control of Carter’s. 380 pistol, pulled the shirt from his face, and held him until police arrived. The first responding officer found Carter on the ground and placed him in handcuffs. Court records say he made a series of statements in the aftermath, including apologizing and asking about Khan’s condition.
The case did not end as an unsolved robbery or a murky street-side killing. In May 2016, a Crisp County grand jury indicted Carter on charges including malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. His trial began in November 2016, and the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for malice murder, plus a consecutive five-year term for the firearm charge; the firearm-by-convicted-felon count also resulted in a concurrent sentence.
At trial and later on appeal, Carter tried to cast the shooting as self-defense, arguing that Khan fired first. The Georgia Supreme Court rejected that claim when it upheld the conviction in December 2020. The court said the jury was entitled to conclude that Carter was the aggressor because he came into the parking lot at about 1:00 a.m. with his face covered, a gun already drawn, and rushed at Khan while shouting commands. Even if Khan returned fire, the court found there was enough evidence for jurors to decide that Carter initiated the confrontation and murdered him. The appeal also records that Carter had a prior felony conviction for robbery by intimidation, which supported the felon-in-possession charge.
So the known suspect in Khan’s death was Marquerius Dandre Carter, and the case resulted in an arrest, indictment, conviction, and life-without-parole sentence rather than an open-ended search for unknown attackers. What remains in the record is the picture of a neighborhood store owner finishing another late night of work, a sudden ambush in the parking lot, and a robbery attempt that ended with Khan dead, the gunman wounded and captured at the scene, and a Georgia court years later leaving no doubt about who was held responsible.
