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The owner of the convenience store kitty-corner to Dawson Park, the North Portland park that’s been plagued by drive-by shootings and frequent drug deals in recent years, was arrested on a slew of drug-related charges March 4.
Court records show Donald Sharma, the owner of the Stop ‘N Go Mini Mart at 2858 N Williams Ave., was booked into the Multnomah County Detention Center on 16 felony charges.
He now faces eight felony counts, including alleged manufacturing, possession and delivery of cocaine, heroine and methamphetamine.
Another eight charges—relating to possession, delivery and manufacturing within 1,000 feet of a school—were dropped, according to the Oregon court records system. (Arc En Ciel Montessori School, a preschool and kindergarten school, sits across the park from the Stop N’ Go Mini Mart.)
A probable cause affidavit notes that the Portland Police Bureau was granted a search warrant for the convenience store on Feb. 26. Before executing the warrant, a police officer stopped Sharma, 43, nearby in his car, and told him he would be executing the warrant. According to the affidavit, Sharma said to the police officer, “someone must have been snitching.”
During the execution of the search warrant on March 3, 2025, police officers found “101 grams of presumptive positive cocaine, 19.57 grams of presumptive positive heroin, 16.79 grams of presumptive positive methamphetamine, and 889 pills of presumptive positive fentanyl pills,” the PC affidavit reports.
Officers also reported finding guns, “digital scales with suspected drug residue,” plastic baggies and razor blades.
WW reported on Dawson Park’s unique problems in a Sept. 14, 2022 cover story. The park, a park cherished by the Black community and often filled with a group of older men playing dominoes, had also been the center of a spate of gun violence and drug-dealing in recent years, much of it happening in drive-by shootings along North Stanton Street.
Between 2020 and 2022, three people had been killed in the park by gunfire. Both residents living near the park and the men who spent hours in the park playing dominoes told WW at the time that they felt they’d been abandoned by the city, that took little action to quell either the drug-dealing or the gun violence.
James Posey, a longtime Black leader in Portland who lived near the park, told WW at the time that Dawson Park “ultimately represents how the city has neglected the Black community”—first, by kicking out Black families by gentrification and second, by abandoning the park as it was beset by crime.
WW wrote of Sharma’s convenience store: “The men on the corner drift in and out of the Stop N Go Mini Mart on the corner. The man behind the register keeps a gun prominently displayed on his hip. He declined to discuss what happens on Stanton Street.”
Multiple people WW spoke to during the reporting of the story described the convenience store as a place associated with drug activity. That allegation was not included in the story at the time because it could not be independently verified.
While the City Council did put more resources toward the park following coverage of Dawson Park’s problems in 2022, it didn’t entirely end the violence. In July of 2024, a 66-year old man was killed at the park in a drive-by shooting.
Sharma had a tangle with the feds in 2021. That’s when the government revoked his ability to participate in the SNAP benefits program, after an undercover agent on four different occasions was able to purchase beer, cigarettes and paper plates and napkins using a SNAP card. Those are not allowable purchases under the program, which is intended to help low-income people purchase groceries. Sharma unsuccessfully fought the decision.
Calls and voicemails to phone numbers associated with Sharma went unreturned. A call to the Stop ‘N Go Mini Mart did not go through.