Shortly before noon on Saturday, April 4, 2020, a license plate reader in College Park, Georgia, flagged a car that Clayton County police had linked to a murder the day before. College Park officers followed it 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, Lieutenant Charles Landrum, was shot in the neck.
The driver got away, with Georgia State Patrol troopers and officers from College Park and Hapeville behind him, and crashed on Virginia Avenue in Atlanta. Officers arrested him and found a handgun at the scene. He had been shot in the arm. He was Edward Lee Cherry, 33, of Jacksonville, Florida.
Landrum later described what happened at the end of the chase. He rammed Cherry's car twice; Cherry shot him, and the bullet missed his carotid artery by millimeters. The collision knocked the gun out of Cherry's hand. Landrum said he called out for Jesus to protect him and felt "him come down all around me." He survived.
Prosecutors later said Cherry had killed two people in Clayton County, just south of Atlanta, in the space of about three days. They said he shot Shakai Gordon in 2020 and, about three days later, shot Lydia Tate Foran. The GBI's account places that second killing on Friday, April 3, 2020, the day before the chase. According to Clayton County prosecutors, Gordon and Foran did not know each other, and Cherry killed them to take their cars.
The sources found give no further detail about who Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran were.
Cherry was held without bond in the Fulton County Jail from April 2020 on charges including aggravated assault and kidnapping. His cases did not come to trial for nearly five years.
In 2022 he stabbed another detainee, who survived. Then, shortly before 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 2024, four years to the day after his arrest, Cherry, then 36, stabbed Leonard Fortner, 37, in the day room of the housing zone the two men shared. Fortner had been in the jail since January 2, held without bond on a charge of criminal damage to property. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead at 7:39 p.m. Cherry was charged with murder, aggravated assault and possession of a knife during a felony.
Fortner's death came while the U.S. Justice Department's civil rights division was investigating conditions at the jail, including violence. Ten people had died in Fulton County custody the previous year, and Fortner was the second that year.
On March 5, 2025, Cherry pleaded guilty in Fulton County Superior Court to four indictments: the murder of Leonard Fortner, which was the lead case; the aggravated assault on Lieutenant Landrum; the 2022 jail stabbing; and a 2020 kidnapping and armed robbery. Judge Robert McBurney sentenced him to life plus 15 years. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said the sentence should bring closure to the victims and marked "the beginning of justice for society."
At that point Cherry had pleaded not guilty to the two Clayton County murders, and a trial was set for August. Instead, on a Thursday in August 2025, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran and to other crimes. He was sentenced to life, to run concurrently with the Fulton County sentence.
Days after the Clayton County plea, Cherry gave a short jailhouse interview to WSB-TV investigative reporter Mark Winne. Clayton County District Attorney Tasha Mosley had called him "a cold-hearted serial killer," saying that the number of killings in more than one place qualified him for the label even if he did not fit the version in films. Asked about it, Cherry said, "I don't think I'm a serial killer. I just think, in situation, I just do what I got to do." He said that when he was put in situations he was "the one who shoots first."
He said that pleading guilty was "the best option for me." He suggested that a life sentence in Georgia meant "only 30 years"; Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Broadnax said he was unlikely ever to be paroled. Of his Clayton County victims, Cherry said, "I had a lot of money, I had a lot of drugs," implying they had meant to rob him. Mosley rejected that and said he wanted their cars. Of Leonard Fortner, he said he had told the man to leave him alone.
"I've never seen anybody as cold, as heartless, as Edward Cherry," Broadnax said.
Prosecutors in Georgia have said Cherry is a suspect in two murders in or near Jacksonville, Florida, and that one of the victims was his grandmother. They said they expected him to be extradited and that Florida might seek the death penalty. Asked whether he expected that, Cherry said, "Probably." Asked about the Florida cases, he said only that he had talked to his family, and would not say whether he had killed anyone there.
As of March 2025 no charges had been filed in Florida, and the State Attorney's Office for Florida's Fourth Judicial Circuit, which covers Jacksonville, said it would give updates when they became public. No Florida charge, indictment or extradition was found in reporting through October 2026.
Cherry has pleaded guilty to three murders: Shakai Gordon and Lydia Tate Foran in Clayton County in 2020, and Leonard Fortner in the Fulton County Jail in 2024, along with the shooting of a police officer, a second jail stabbing, and a kidnapping and armed robbery. The two Florida deaths are suspicions only. He is serving life sentences in Georgia.