Maged Ghaly, a 49-year-old White man, was working the late hours at Danial Market on Dickerson Pike in Nashville when an ordinary night tightened into something final and irreversible. The small market was the kind of place where regulars came in for familiar errands and familiar faces, and he was a familiar face there himself—steady behind the counter, known to many customers by the nickname “Mike.”
Just after midnight on August 22, 2020, investigators said a would-be robbery unfolded inside the store. Surveillance video captured a lone person entering shortly before the violence, and then running out afterward, heading south along Dickerson Pike. In the minutes that followed, the market fell quiet again—until a customer arrived and found Ghaly dead behind the counter shortly before 12:50 a.m., prompting police response and the start of a fast-moving homicide investigation.
As detectives pieced together the timeline, Metro Nashville Police released images and asked the public to help identify the person seen in the footage, routing tips through Crime Stoppers and noting that a reward was available. By that evening, police said Jerome Knight Jr. surrendered to detectives. He was charged with criminal homicide and attempted especially aggravated robbery, and police set out the basic contours of the case in public statements: the killing occurred just after midnight at Danial Market on Dickerson Pike, and the surrender came the same day. Bond was set at $200,000.
Outside the market, grief gathered in public. A memorial grew near the storefront, marking the place where neighbors said they’d been greeted, helped, and sometimes quietly carried through hard moments. In interviews, his daughter described him as generous to customers who came up short, and she spoke of how he had moved from Egypt to Middle Tennessee to build a life for his children, working and owning the store for about five years. She said the shot struck his neck and that he died immediately. A fundraiser was created to help cover funeral expenses as the community tried to support the family in the wake of the killing.
Public reporting and official releases available online document the arrest-by-surrender and the initial charges, but they do not consistently provide later courtroom outcomes such as a trial result, plea, or sentencing in the materials reviewed here. What is clear in the public record is the shape of the night itself—an attempted robbery, a fatal shooting in a neighborhood market, and an investigation that quickly narrowed to a named suspect who turned himself in within hours.
