Pizza Shop Rivalry Escalates to Attempted Murder Charges

One pizza shop owner is in jail and another is just glad to be alive after an argument about whose flyers can be posted where turned unexpectedly violent. Hamayan Rashid, the owner of Little Villa’s Pizza, and Shaikh Ahmed, of Prime Pizza, saw each other outside an Atlanta-area Best Western, a hotel where they’d both placed flyers advertising their respective restaurants.

Ahmed reportedly accused Rashid of removing Prime Pizza’s signs, and Rashid responded by threatening his pizza rival, a confrontation that was captured on the hotel’s security cameras. “He threatens everybody. Every pizza store,” Ahmed told WSB-TV. “He said, ‘I’m a dangerous man. Be afraid of me.’”

Rashid meant it. After the two men got into their SUVs, Rashid rammed Ahmed’s vehicle with his own, pushing it toward the street. “When it happened, I had difficulty breathing,” Ahmed said. “I was calling 911.”

Leslie Miller Terry, Ahmed’s attorney, said that her client could’ve been killed in the incident, and a judge seems to have agreed with that assessment. Rashid is facing charges of aggravated assault with intent to murder and, on Wednesday, was booked into the Clayton County Jail. On Friday, Judge Richard Brown denied his bond and he remains behind bars, away from pizza and promotional flyers, Best Westerns and SUVs.

Rashid’s behavior is indefensible and—if the online reviews are accurate—so is his pizza. Little Villa’s Pizza has a 1.5 star rating on Yelp, and a number of those reviewers were guests at Atlanta hotels who waited upwards of an hour to open a box of pepperoni-topped disappointment. “You're better off starving,” a woman named Claudia wrote, while someone named Erica was even more blunt: “I think it tasted better when I threw it up,” she said. (Prime Pizza is only slightly better, with a 2.5 star rating on Google. “NO LOVE WHATSOEVER WENT INTO ANYTHING THEY COOKED,” one reviewer said).

Ahmed says he is relieved that his rival is in jail, but he is still afraid of him. “[I am] confident I will get justice,” he said.