A son's dream lives

Khurram Tariq says his father's killing won't keep him out of medical school

RALEIGH -- Khurram Tariq had scrapped plans to return to a foreign medical school when his father was gunned down in the family's convenience store in Southeast Raleigh last month.

But the first-year medical student will soon head back to St. George's University in Grenada.

It's a decision he said his father made for him.

"People kept coming into the store and asking me, 'Are you the son in medical school?' and telling me how important it was to him that I followed my dream," said Tariq, 24.

A customer found Tariq Hussain, 52, dead behind the counter in Bobby's Grocery, 3114 Garner Road, on Oct. 14. Raleigh police officials said he had been shot several times, the victim of a robbery that morning. No arrests have been made.

The death has turned the family's lives upside down, said Hussain's widow, Shahana Tariq. The store is the family's only source of income.

None of the family members wanted to go back inside, she said.

"This is where they found him," she said, pointing to the floor behind the counter in the front of the store. "It's hard for me to sit in this chair. My husband used to sit here. It hurt me.

"But we need money."

Khurram Tariq had been in town to celebrate with his family. Eid al-Fitr, the three-day culmination of the Muslim holiday Ramadan, fell that weekend. Tariq had a birthday coming up. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in the spring, he had spent time in Asia and missed out on other birthdays, Father's Day. They celebrated those, too.

About noon Oct. 14, two days before Tariq was supposed to be on a plane back to school, Raleigh police officers came to their house in Cary, informing them of the shooting.

Four days later, accompanied by relatives and friends, Tariq went to the store, a red brick building surrounded by trees on Garner Road near Rush Street. He said he stepped to the door, took a deep breath, and went inside, erasing any hints of the crime that had taken his father's life.

The next day the store reopened, and a medical student became a businessman.

"Family's important to me," Tariq said. "My job right now is to make sure my family is together. I'm going to do whatever I have to do for my family."

That meant putting medical school on hold to run a place he had really only seen in passing.

"I've probably been here about 20 times in the last four years," he said. "The employees didn't even know how to pronounce my name, if that tells you how much I came here."

But he has opened -- and sometimes closed -- the store every day since Oct. 17.

Tariq and his mother staff the store from about 9 a.m. until just after 3 p.m., when one of two longtime clerks relieves them for the evening.

He said in the past three weeks, he has learned it takes more to run a business than he ever thought it would.

"I didn't know how many bills we paid each month, let alone how much we paid," he said. "You think of running a business and being your own boss, and you put a rosy picture in your head."

Comfort in family

He has found relief in going home at night. His sister, Ghazal, and her 2-year-old daughter, Umna, have been visiting from Oregon since Hussain's death. A third sibling, Wajiha, is a student at N.C. State University.

"We get busy with [Umna] when we get home," he said of his energetic niece. "It's been a stress reducer."

Slowly, family members are returning to their lives. His older sister and her daughter will be heading home in the next week. Tariq said he will return to St. George's in mid-January.

When he turned on the computer in the back room at the convenience store, he saw a picture of himself on the backdrop. In it, he was wearing his lab coat. The same picture was on the desktop of the computer at home.

"My family doesn't want me to give up on my education," he said. "[My father] really wanted me ... to finish medical school."

Leaving the family behind will be hard, he said, but becoming a doctor and eventually helping the family move on from the store will be worth it.

"Life is not safe for convenience store owners," he said. "There were all these nice people who come in here, calling my father 'Papa,' and this one guy who came in and shot him."