By the time Gurkirat Singh Manocha boarded a flight to Canada in early 2024, his plan was already fully formed. One year at Northern Lights College in Fort St. John, British Columbia; a postgraduate diploma in business management; then back to India, to his father’s food supply business in Ujjain, equipped with his new credentials and a clearer sense of how to grow what the family had spent years building.
However, he would never make it to graduation. On the night of March 14, Gurkirat was allegedly attacked by a group of 10-12 people in Fort St. John, assaulted and then run over by a vehicle. He was taken to a hospital with critical injuries, but he did not survive.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested all the accused. The postmortem report, which will formally determine the cause of death and guide prosecution, is still pending.
The last conversation Gurkirat had with his father, Gurpreet, was the day before the incident. Gurpreet describes it as routine, the kind of call between a father and a son. “He was close to finishing. He was going to come home,” Gurpreet told The . “My son was innocent. He was going with big dreams.”
Fort St. John, in the northeastern corner of British Columbia, is a small city of roughly 22,000 people.
Gurkirat attended classes four days a week and worked the remaining three. He had taken a job at a local Walmart store.
His elder brother, Prabkirat Singh, who lives in Raipur, said the family was told that Gurkirat had been taken along by a group of fellow students after work — routine socialising, the kind of evening that doesn’t ordinarily require a second thought. What followed is still being pieced together by investigators. A dispute, accounts suggest, escalated into a confrontation. The confrontation became an assault. A vehicle was involved.
“We were told a group of boys beat him and then ran him over,” Prabkirat said, adding, “Around 10-12 people were involved.”
In Ujjain, the family is now waiting on paperwork. The repatriation of a body from Canada to India is a procedural undertaking that can take up substantial time over death certificates, consular involvement, embalming requirements, and the documentation of the legal status of the remains while an investigation is active.
Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister has promised to provide assistance to the family.
For the family that wants to bring their son home to perform his last rites, each passing day is a big expanse of time. “They say the autopsy will be completed by March 20. We hope for some financial support to bring my son’s body back. His college in Ujjain has promised to erect a statue in his honour, the administration informed me,” Gurpreet said.
