Fayetteville man fighting for life after being attacked outside Family Dollar

Police are searching for three men who attacked a cancer patient outside a Fayetteville discount store last week, leaving him critically injured.

Marvin Herring, 53, was leaving a Family Dollar store at 2893 Owen Drive last Thursday afternoon when a man followed him out of the store and attacked him in a handicap parking space.

"[The guy] came up around the back of the van that he was driving, that was parked at the front door, and yanked him out of the van," Herring's stepdaughter, Cortney Locklear, told WRAL News in an exclusive inveriew Tuesday. "When he was yanked out, he hit the concrete, hit his head pretty hard."

Locklear said the man stole Herring's wallet and money, and police said he and two others drove off in a silver Dodge Magnum with a black left front rim.

Herring is on a ventilator at Cape Fear Valley Medical Center, and Locklear said the family now faces the difficult decision of whether to take him off of life support.

"He's a really laid-back guy," she said of her stepfather.

He was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, right after his 50th birthday. Locklear said he loved to eat, shop and take care of his two grandchildren.

"They'll be 1 this coming month, and he loved them," she said. "He loved to feed them, and we joked about him making them fat, and he would make them all kinds of stuff."

Herring was at the Family Dollar to buy flowers to put on his mother's grave, Locklear said.

"Her death anniversary was [Monday], so he wanted to make sure that everything looked beautiful," she said.

Getting out of the house was big for him after cancer left him stuck at home or in the hospital for treatment, she said.

"It's just a really sad situation," Locklear said of the attack. "I get married this year. I really hoped that he would really continue to persevere through the cancer and be able to make it to September. But, unfortunately, we were robbed. We were robbed of many memories, and he was robbed of whatever time he had left here."

Police said that, if Herring dies, the case becomes a homicide investigation.

Anyone with information is asked to call Fayetteville police at 910-309-2542 or Crime Stoppers at 910-483-TIPS.