At about 11:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 4, 2020, a license plate reader in College Park, Georgia, a small city on the south side of Atlanta beside Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, sent an alert to the city's police. The car it had picked up was linked to a murder investigation in neighboring Clayton County from the day before. College Park officers followed it out of their city and into East Point and tried to stop it. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the driver got out and fired at them. Two officers fired back. A third was shot in the neck.
The driver got back into the car and fled, with Georgia State Patrol troopers and officers from College Park and Hapeville behind him. The chase ended in a crash in the 1200 block of Virginia Avenue. Officers arrested the driver and found a handgun at the scene. He had been shot in the arm. He was treated at Grady Memorial Hospital, released into custody and taken to the East Point jail. His name was Edward Lee Cherry. He was 33 and came from Jacksonville, Florida.
It would be almost five and a half years before the courts finished with him. In that time he would kill again, inside the Fulton County Jail, and would plead guilty to three murders in all. Prosecutors in Georgia say he is also a suspect in two killings in Florida, one of them his own grandmother's.
The wounded officer was Charles Landrum of the College Park Police Department, then a sergeant and later a lieutenant. He was taken to hospital, where the bullet was removed, and kept overnight for observation. City officials said at first that his wound did not appear serious. It was more serious than that.
Landrum told his own story years later, to WSB-TV's Mark Winne in March 2025, and earlier to FOX 5 Atlanta's Deidra Dukes. In his account, the shooting came at the end of the chase, not at its start. He rammed Cherry's car to stop it. Just before he rammed it a second time, Cherry shot him. The bullet came through his windshield, which a dash camera recorded shattering, and struck his neck millimeters from the carotid artery. "He shot me just an instant before I rammed him," Landrum said. The collision knocked the gun out of Cherry's hand and out of the car.
"When I called out that I'd been hit I called out for Jesus to protect me," he said. He described feeling a presence come down around him, "not with me, not beside me, but in somewhere I cannot describe." He believed the crash saved him. With one hand holding his gun and the other pressing on the wound, he said, he could not have won a second exchange: had Cherry kept the gun, "He might've got over on me."
College Park Police Chief Ferman Williford said Landrum nearly died that day; he had been told that a slightly deeper wound could have let him bleed to death before an ambulance arrived. Landrum went back to work a few weeks later and recovered fully. In August 2020 Williford presented him with the department's Purple Heart, given to officers wounded in the line of duty. "It really was an amazing honor," Landrum said. Strangers from across the country had written to encourage him.
The accounts of that day differ in their details. The GBI's release describes a driver who got out of his car and fired at officers in East Point before driving off and crashing on Virginia Avenue, which the GBI placed in Atlanta and FOX 5 in Hapeville. WSB-TV's first report put the end of the chase near North Outer Loop Road and Toffie Terrace, by the airport, and said a second scene was off South Martin Street in East Point. Landrum's own account places his wound at the moment of the ramming. Early reports also left it unclear who had fired the shot that hit him. Cherry's later guilty plea to aggravated assault on Landrum settled that question, but not the exact sequence.
The car that tripped the plate reader belonged to a story that had begun days earlier in Clayton County, the suburban county just south of Atlanta. Prosecutors later said Cherry shot and killed Shakai Gordon in 2020 and, about three days later, shot and killed Lydia Tate Foran. The GBI dated the Clayton County murder it was investigating to Friday, April 3, 2020, the day before the chase, which places Foran's death on that day.
According to Clayton County District Attorney Tasha Mosley, the two victims did not know each other, and Cherry killed them to take their cars. Cherry has offered a different story. In a jail interview after his plea he said, "I had a lot of money, I had a lot of drugs," suggesting that the people he shot had meant to rob him and that he had acted first. Mosley called that claim false.
Very little about Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran as people has reached the public record. No published report found gives their ages, their occupations, or how or where they met Cherry, and no family member is quoted in the coverage found. Their names appear in the record chiefly as the counts to which their killer pleaded guilty. That silence is a gap in the reporting, not a measure of the lives that were taken.
Cherry's cases moved slowly. In Fulton County, where the chase and shooting took place, he faced charges including aggravated assault on a police officer and a 2020 kidnapping and armed robbery. The details of that kidnapping and robbery, and its victim, were not made public in the reports found. In Clayton County he was indicted for the two murders and pleaded not guilty. From April 2020 he was held without bond in the Fulton County Jail on Rice Street in Atlanta, and he stayed there for four years.
The jail was in poor shape. It held about 2,000 people and at times more than 3,000. A federal investigation would later find that the county failed to protect people held there from homicides, stabbings and sexual abuse by other detainees. More than 300 stabbings were recorded in 2023 alone, involving contraband and makeshift weapons, and six people died from violence in the jail between 2022 and late 2024. Ten people died in Fulton County custody in 2023 from all causes.
In 2022, while awaiting trial, Cherry stabbed another detainee. The man survived. His name has not been published in the reports found, and the stabbing became one of the four Fulton County indictments Cherry would later plead guilty to.
Leonard Fortner was 37. Atlanta police arrested him on January 2, 2024, on a charge of criminal damage to property, and he was held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. Three months later he was housed in the same zone of the jail as Cherry. His parents, Donna and Terry Fortner, would become the public voice for him after his death. "We miss Leonard. We truly miss Leonard," his mother said, "but Leonard will not go down in vain."
Shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 2024, four years to the day after his arrest in the chase, Cherry, then 36, attacked Fortner in the day room of their housing zone and stabbed him repeatedly. The Fulton County Sheriff's Office timed the attack at 6:24 p.m. Fortner was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:39 p.m. The Atlanta Police Department investigated, and Cherry was charged with murder, aggravated assault and possession of a knife during the commission of a felony. His only recorded explanation came later, in his jail interview: "I told that dude to just leave me alone."
The next day Sheriff Pat Labat held a news conference. The weapon, he said, had been fashioned from scrap metal taken from the jail building itself. "What you see here is a piece of the Fulton County Jail that was fashioned," he said. "It's one thing to keep contraband out, but it's another thing for thousands of knives to be created." He called the jail "in crisis," as it had been "for decades," and he and other officials tied the danger to years of underfunded security and maintenance. Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington said the county had to do much better. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said he was "extremely concerned about the crisis at the Fulton County Jail" and blamed the county commission for underfunding services for the people held there. Fortner was the second person to die in the jail's custody that year, at a time when the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division was already investigating conditions there.
In June 2024 the Fortner family announced that it would sue. Their lawyer, CK Hoffler, said the sheriff had made decisions that led to Fortner's death and the deaths of others, and that while the building was run down, steps could have been taken to stop it from reaching that condition. The family said more money or a new jail was not the answer. In April 2025 Donna and Terry Fortner filed a federal complaint against Sheriff Labat, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts and the Board of Commissioners. It said their son had been stabbed 20 times, that Cherry had made his weapon from the jail's crumbling walls, and that the death was foreseeable. The county and the sheriff's office declined to comment on pending litigation. No outcome of the suit was found as of October 2026.
On November 14, 2024, the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced their findings: conditions at the jail violated the Constitution and federal law. "Detention in the Fulton County Jail has amounted to a death sentence for dozens of people," said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke. In early 2025 the county agreed to a consent decree that put the jail under federal oversight, with an independent monitor reporting every six months.
On March 5, 2025, Cherry pleaded guilty in Fulton County Superior Court to all four of his indictments there: the murder of Leonard Fortner, which was the lead case; the aggravated assault on Landrum; the 2022 jail stabbing; and the 2020 kidnapping and armed robbery. "Judge Robert McBurney sentenced Mr. Cherry for all four of his cases for a total sentence of life plus 15 years," said Executive District Attorney Adam Abbate, who led the prosecution. District Attorney Fani Willis said the sentence should bring closure to the victims and was "the beginning of justice for society."
A week later Landrum gave his first full public account of the shooting to WSB-TV. By then the Clayton County Public Defender Office, which represented Cherry on the murder charges there, said its lawyers were "preparing a strong, effective defense on his behalf." A trial was set for August.
There was no trial. On a Thursday in August 2025 Cherry pleaded guilty to the murders of Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran and to other crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison, to run concurrently with his Fulton County sentence. "He's a cold-hearted serial killer," District Attorney Mosley said. "He has no heart." Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Broadnax said, "I've never seen anybody as cold, as heartless, as Edward Cherry."
Days after the Clayton County plea, Cherry sat for a short interview with Winne in the Clayton County Jail. Asked how he felt about being called a serial killer, he said, "I don't think I'm a serial killer. I just think, in situation, I just do what I got to do." When he was put in situations, he said, he was "the one who shoots first." Mosley had already answered that argument: Cherry did not fit the image of a serial killer from the films, she said, but the number of killings in more than one place qualified him.
He said pleading guilty had been "the best option for me." He believed a life sentence in Georgia meant "only 30 years." Broadnax said he was mistaken and was very unlikely ever to be paroled. Asked where his life had gone wrong, he said, "I don't know, somewhat." He offered no other account of his upbringing, his years in Jacksonville, or what brought him to metro Atlanta in the spring of 2020, and no report found fills in that background.
In March 2025 Clayton County Chief Assistant District Attorney Bonnie Smith said Cherry was a suspect in two murders in or near Jacksonville, and that one of the victims was his grandmother. By August prosecutors said they expected him to be extradited to Florida soon, and that his Georgia life sentences gave Florida authorities the chance to seek the death penalty. Asked whether he thought Florida would seek it, Cherry said, "Probably." Asked about the Florida allegations, he said only, "I talked to my family, that's it," and would not say whether he had killed anyone there.
As of March 2025 no charges had been filed in Florida. The State Attorney's Office for the Fourth Judicial Circuit, which covers Jacksonville, said it understood "the developments that have taken place in Georgia" and would give updates on any Jacksonville cases when they became public. Neither victim, the grandmother included, has been named in the reporting found, and the dates of the deaths have not been published. No Florida charge, indictment or extradition was found in reporting through October 2026.
What is proven is what Cherry has admitted in court. He pleaded guilty to the murders of Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran in Clayton County in 2020 and of Leonard Fortner in the Fulton County Jail in 2024, to shooting a police officer, to a second jail stabbing, and to a kidnapping and armed robbery. The motive in the Clayton County killings is disputed: prosecutors say he killed for the victims' cars, while Cherry says, without evidence, that they meant to rob him. The two Florida deaths are suspicions only; he has not been charged, and he has refused to discuss them. "Serial killer" is the Clayton County district attorney's description, and Cherry rejects it. Unknown in the public record are the victims' life stories, Cherry's own background before 2020, the identity of the man he stabbed in 2022, and the victim of the 2020 kidnapping. He is serving life sentences in Georgia.
2020 (about three days before April 3): Shakai Gordon shot and killed in Clayton County.
April 3, 2020: Lydia Tate Foran shot and killed in Clayton County.
April 4, 2020, about 11:45 a.m.: A license plate reader in College Park flags a car linked to the Clayton County murder; Cherry fires at officers in East Point, Sgt. Charles Landrum is shot in the neck, and Cherry is arrested after a crash.
August 2020: Landrum receives the College Park Police Purple Heart.
2022: Cherry stabs a fellow detainee in the Fulton County Jail; the man survives.
January 2, 2024: Leonard Fortner arrested in Atlanta on a property damage charge.
April 4, 2024, 6:24 p.m.: Cherry stabs Fortner in a jail day room; Fortner dies at 7:39 p.m.
April 5, 2024: Sheriff Pat Labat calls the jail "in crisis."
June 2024: Fortner's family announces a lawsuit.
November 14, 2024: Federal findings that Fulton County Jail conditions are unconstitutional.
March 5, 2025: Cherry pleads guilty to four Fulton County indictments; life plus 15 years.
April 2025: Fortner's parents file a federal complaint.
August 2025: Cherry pleads guilty to the Gordon and Foran murders in Clayton County; life, concurrent.
October 2026: No Florida charge found.