A 35-year-old man has been charged with first-degree murder after a stabbing at a dépanneur in Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal borough on Thursday. Xavier Gellatly appeared in court via video conference on Friday to face the criminal charge after the body of Chong Woo Kim, 55, was found inside the store. The accused is known to police, having served time in prison for stabbing a woman to death in British Columbia in 2012. On Thursday, Montreal police (SPVM) says it was called at 7:30 a.m. to the scene on Berri Street near the Laurier Metro station. Kim, who owned the dépanneur, according to the Registraire des entreprises Québec, was declared dead on site. At the time, authorities explained that the suspect had fled using a bus and the Metro. As a result, Papineau Metro on the Green line was closed for several hours. Part of Beaudry Metro, also on the Green line, was cordoned off to allow investigators to analyze the scene. A suspect was arrested at 11:30 a.m. near the Complexe Desjardins in downtown Montreal. Kim’s death is the fifth recorded homicide on the Montreal police’s territory this year. Gellatly is expected back in court on May 4. Woman stabbed in Vancouver hotel This is not the first time Gellatly has been charged in connection with a person’s death. A British Columbia judge sentenced him to seven years in prison for stabbing a woman to death on the morning of March 19, 2012, during a fight at the Cobalt Hotel in Vancouver. He was charged with second-degree murder in the woman’s death and aggravated assault after injuring another man. He later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and the assault charge. At the time of the fatal stabbing, Gellatly was 21 years old and on probation. Court documents show the 2012 altercation started when his then-girlfriend was getting ready to go snowboarding. She got into an argument with another woman at 6 a.m., according to the records. Gellatly and another man came to intervene, and they began fighting. Gellatly followed the man into his hotel room, where the man brandished a knife. Gellatly received a long gash in his thigh before grabbing the knife and stabbing the other man seven times. In the middle of the melée, Gellatly also stabbed Chelsea Holden, the woman who had gotten into the altercation with his girlfriend. He then fled the scene. Holden was found unresponsive when police and paramedics arrived and was pronounced dead at the hospital. The other man involved suffered serious injuries. According to a summary of victim impact statements, Holden’s mother said her daughter’s death was the “worst day by far of her life.” Holden was a mother of two, though due to a strained relationship with her daughters’ father, her mother told the court she no longer has access to her granddaughters. “This further saddens her,” the summary stated. Gellatly was charged for the attacks on the two victims. While he was awaiting trial in 2013, he attacked another inmate with a razor blade tied to a plastic knife, causing the victim to suffer cuts to his cheek, back and the back of his head. In 2014, he sucker-punched a corrections officer. Gellatly’s lawyer argued his client was acting in self-defence and was trying to stop a fight during the hotel incident. When the judge sentenced him to seven years on Feb. 6, 2015, he made note of the accused’s troubled past. He said Gellatly was raised by a single mother in Montreal and that his father struggled with substance abuse issues. At 14, he was put in a group home by child protection services. Since then, he has spent a considerable amount of time in custody in B.C. for charges of assault, assaulting a police officer, uttering threats, theft and unauthorized possession of a prohibited weapon. A symptom of his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was a lack of impulse control, the judge said. “Mr. Gellatly, I have listened carefully this morning,” the judge said at his sentencing, “and think there is much hope for a better life for you at the end of the period of imprisonment.” Gellatly also has a lengthy criminal record in Quebec, including pleading guilty to animal cruelty in a 2022 incident. In that case, he intentionally killed a rabbit and attempted to kill a cat. He was sentenced to 42 days in jail and put on probation for two years.
