“I think I shot him,” the clerk, Anwar Ghazali, 29, told a customer when he returned to the store, according to a police affidavit and the Shelby County district attorney’s office.
Ghazali didn’t call the police, the authorities said.
Harris’ body was discovered two days later in a nearby yard, where he had bled to death from a gunshot wound in the back of his left leg, the district attorney’s office said, and Ghazali was arrested.
After a four-day trial, Ghazali was convicted by a jury Thursday of second-degree murder, the Shelby County district attorney, Amy Weirich, said in a statement Friday.
Lora Fowler, a prosecutor, said Harris had been “left to bleed out and die.”
“This defendant took it upon himself to be the judge and jury and the executioner over a $2 beer,” she said, according to WMC Action News in Memphis.
Ghazali faces 15 to 25 years in prison and will be sentenced Sept. 23, his lawyer, Blake Ballin, said in an email Monday. He was initially indicted on first-degree murder charges, which would have carried a life sentence, but Ballin argued at the trial that the case was “neither a premeditated nor a knowing killing.” The gun belonged to the store’s owner, he said.
“Mr. Ghazali maintains that he had no intent to kill Mr. Harris over a stolen beer,” he said in the email. “Rather, he acted recklessly when he wildly fired into a dark field as Mr. Harris ran away in order to scare him.”
He said that Ghazali did not call the police because he did not believe that he had actually hit the teenager with gunfire.
After the shooting, several dozen people protested, demanding the closing of the store, according to local news reports. Ballin said Ghazali had worked there as a cashier for about two months.
“If we don’t value black lives and believe that Dorian’s life is worth far more than an allegedly stolen beer, then we’re not authentically honoring my father,” the Rev. Bernice A. King — the daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and the chief executive of the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta — said on Twitter in April 2018.
On Friday, after the verdict, a columnist for The Commercial Appeal, Ryan Poe, wrote: “Harris shouldn’t have stolen the drink, but that’s not the point. Harris wasn’t on trial. The trial was about whether Ghazali, who wasn’t in fear of his life, should have shot and killed a fleeing Harris for stealing a $2 drink.”
In a statement released after the verdict, Ballin described Memphis as a community that is struggling and plagued by racial and economic inequality.
“I understand why this case has caused public frustration, because another African American kid has been needlessly killed,” Ballin said in an email Monday.
“But decisions of guilt and innocence and questions of intent should not be based on emotion,” he said. “The defense team did our best to make sure that the jury rendered a verdict based on the facts of the case and not on the color of someone’s skin. That would just be another injustice.”
“Why did this happen to my son?” Harris’ father, Hanson Peete, told WMC Action News at the start of the trial; he could not be reached by telephone or email Monday. “Why was it that he was left there like that? Like he was nothing. Like he was a nobody.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.