A Dollar General clerk is charged with manslaughter after police say he shot and killed an armed robber. The clerk said it was the 6th attempted armed robbery at the store since August.

Dollar General

• A Dollar General employee is facing charges following an armed robbery that left the suspect dead.
• The employee, Rafus Anderson, told police it was the sixth attempt at the store since August and that he feared for his life.
• Anderson was released Tuesday with no bail.

A Dollar General employee in Louisiana has been charged with manslaughter after police say he shot and killed a would-be armed robber at his store in Monroe, Louisiana.

According to the police report, Rafus Anderson was working at the Dollar General in downtown Monroe on Monday when an armed suspect robbed the store. Police say Anderson fired a shot that hit the suspect and another customer as the suspect fled the store.

Police responding to the shooting found the suspect north of the store "lying in the money he had just robbed the store of," according to the report. The suspect later died from the injury.

Dollar General did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

After closing the store, Anderson turned himself in to authorities, according to the report.

He told police it was the sixth attempted armed robbery at that location since August, including four successful robberies, and that he was afraid the suspect was going to kill him.

Anderson was released Tuesday with no bail and was scheduled to appear in court Wednesday.

A 2020 investigation from the New Yorker and ProPublica found that dollar stores are a frequent target of armed robberies, owing both to their locations in typically less-affluent neighborhoods and their reliance on physical cash for transactions.

"In a lot of these areas, they're the only stores around," reporter B. J. Bethel, of the local NBC affiliate in Dayton, Ohio, told the outlet at the time. For robbers, he added, "it's the only place to get cash."

More than 85 shooting incidents occurred in 2022 at or near businesses with the word "Dollar" in the name, according to a database maintained by the Gun Violence Archive.

Discount retailers like Dollar General, Family Dollar, and Dollar Tree are opening more new stores than any other retail category in the US as Americans change their spending habits. Dollar General led the pack by a wide margin with more than 1,000 new stores, according to data from Coresight Research.

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