Widow of slain convenience store clerk aims to lessen danger for night workers

Karanpal Singh Bhangu had only been in Edmonton for a few months when he found a job at a downtown Mac’s convenience store.

The owner needed a clerk for the overnight shift and asked if he had any experience dealing with stabbings and robberies, his wife Kiran Bhangu said.

Kiran didn’t like the sound of this and discouraged her husband from taking the job.

“I just don’t want to live with this feeling that you went to work and I’m not sure if you’re going to come back tomorrow morning,” she told him.

On Nov. 16, 2015, he took a job as an overnight clerk at a different Mac’s, in a strip mall in a residential neighbourhood at 82 Street and 34 Avenue in south Edmonton. They both thought it would be safer.

Karanpal had only been on the job for a month and two days when he was shot in the stomach during an armed robbery at 3:30 a.m. He sounded the panic alarm before he was found grievously injured by a police officer.

He died about four months after arriving in Canada from India, having just reunited with his wife and son after 5-1/2 years apart.

Karanpal was one of two Mac’s clerks shot and killed that night. The other was 41-year-old Ricky Massin Cenabre, who worked at a store near 108 Street and 61 Avenue.

Colton Steinhauer, 27, Laylin Delorme, 24, and a 13-year-old boy who cannot be identified under the provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act are each charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

On Jan. 14, six years after immigrating to Canada to set up a new life for her and her family, Kiran attended her husband’s funeral.

“It was Karan’s dream, he wanted to come to Canada,” she said. “Now him not being here, it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Kiran spoke publicly about her husband and the tragedy that befell her family in those early morning hours of Dec. 18, 2015, for the first time this Father’s Day weekend.

She held an event on Saturday at the Progressive Academy, the school where she works, to launch the Karan Project, a forum she hopes will raise awareness about the dangers night workers face.

Kiran wants the government and retail companies to find ways of making overnight shifts for convenience and gas station workers safer, such as having clerks work behind bulletproof glass and improving the emergency response to panic alarms.

“Night shift employees are at high-risk of violence and crime, there has to be safer measures followed,” Kiran said. “I wanted to do something about this so nobody else would miss their father on Father’s Day.”

Labour Minister Christina Gray met with Kiran and her group on Saturday to hear their ideas about improving worker safety.

Gray said her ministry is going through the information gathered by occupational health and safety inspectors during visits to roughly 200 convenience stores and gas stations across the province. The visits were prompted by the Mac’s murders.

Last Monday, Karanpal would have turned 36.

Karin isn’t sure what she and her six-year-old son Royce will do now: Live out Karanpal’s “dream” in Canada or go back to India. But she does feel compelled to prevent this from happening to others.

It was Karan’s dream, he wanted to come to Canada. Now him not being here, it just doesn’t make sense to me.