MONTREAL —
A man charged with first-degree murder in the death on Thursday of a Montreal convenience store owner has a lengthy criminal record, which includes a conviction in 2015 for stabbing to death a woman in British Columbia.
Xavier Gellatly, 35, was formally charged on Friday at the Montreal courthouse for allegedly murdering 55-year-old Chong Woo Kim.
The brief court appearance came a day after police found Kim unresponsive inside the store around 7:30 a.m. A manhunt ensued, during which police searched for the accused through the city’s metro system and caught him hours later inside Complexe Desjardins, a downtown office tower and mall a few kilometres from the scene.
Provincial business records indicate Kim is the owner of the Fleur Bleue convenience store on Berri Street where the murder occurred, near the Laurier metro station. Paramedics confirmed Kim’s death at the scene. According to court records, Gellatly lived in an apartment one kilometre away from Kim’s business.
Gellatly has had numerous run-ins with the law and a history of violent crimes, records show. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in February 2015 in Vancouver after stabbing Chelsea Holden to death in 2012 and stabbing another man seven times, giving him permanent nerve damage. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and to aggravated assault in the attacks, which occurred after he got into a fight with the man at a hotel, according to a B.C. Supreme Court sentencing ruling.
Holden, a mother of two, “was entirely innocent and apparently little more than a bystander,” the judge noted at sentencing.
While detained and awaiting sentencing in 2013, Gellatly was charged with attacking an inmate with a razor blade tied to a plastic knife. In June 2014, he was charged with sucker-punching a corrections officer. He pleaded guilty to those charges as well.
Gellaty, who was 21 and on parole at the time of the 2012 Vancouver hotel stabbings, had already amassed a lengthy criminal record in B.C., according to the judge’s ruling.
His sentence for the hotel attacks ended in May 2018, according to documents from the Parole Board of Canada. In a 2016 parole board decision — which had kept him detained — his risk of recidivism was described as “high,” and he was urged to receive treatment for violence and substance abuse.
“Police have indicated that you are prone to violent outbursts that result in stabbing the people you fight with and you are known to carry knives, which is a likely contributing factor to your index offences, and other stabbings on your record,” the 2016 parole board report said. “They also believe that, if released, you will reoffend and kill someone else.”
The B.C. court heard Gellatly was raised in Montreal by a single mother and suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, which includes a lack of impulse control.
At the time he was sentenced to seven years in prison for the hotel knife attacks, the B.C. judge noted that Gellatly spoke “as a man who has a very good chance of rehabilitation and changing his life.”
Gellatly has at least a dozen court files in Quebec. Prior to Kim’s murder, the most recent case involving Gellatly was in 2022, when he was sentenced in Mont-Laurier, Que., to eight months in jail with a two-year probation for animal cruelty.
Gellatly’s murder case is scheduled to return to court on May 4.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 13, 2026.
Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press
