DECATUR, Ga. — The DeKalb County District Attorney's office announced that a jury has convicted Rashad Rogers, a 33-year-old Forest Park man, of the 2010 murder of a fast food employee who was protecting his coworkers during a robbery.
Rogers was found guilty on charges of malice murder and felony murder of the death of 23-year-old Gary Andrews, and has been sentenced to life in prison.
DeKalb police responded to a robbery call at Church's Chicken on Flakes Mill Road at about 9 p.m. on Dec. 18, 2010. Officers found Andrews on the store floor unconscious and bleeding from his head.
Witnesses stated that two men wearing surgical masks came into the restaurant with guns and demanded entry to the safe. When they discovered that the cashier did not have a key, they hopped over the counter and demanded to know where the safe was located.
Andrews had been trying to hide his coworkers in the freezer at the back of the store. One of the suspects put a gun to another employee's head. Andrews tried to intervene and the gunman shot him twice. The suspects took cash from the register and fled.
The case went cold and was picked up in 2012 by the DeKalb Cold Case Unit. At the same time, the FBI was investigating an April 2011 bank robbery that also happened in DeKalb and involved Rogers and two other suspects.
An informant told the FBI that Rogers and the other suspects arrived at his residence the evening of the Church's murder with a lot of money and were talking about the shooting. He overheard Rogers say, "He shouldn’t have moved, I had to do it."
The informant also recalled seeing a wig with red tips, which matched with witness descriptions of the Church's gunman have hair with red tips.
The three bank robbery suspects pled guilty in federal court in November 2012. Murder warrants were taken out for Rogers and another of the defendants, Clifford Jackson, in October 2013, and they were transferred to the DeKalb County Jail after their federal sentences.
On June 10, Jackson pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to serve 20 years. After Rogers' jury trial and conviction, he was sentenced to life in prison.
