Family’s questions linger after student’s death in Poland

Police investigating after Manpreet Kanhaiya fell from fourth-floor window days after arrival

Using text messages and chat apps, 22-year-old Manpreet Kanhaiya kept in constant touch with his Brampton family from the city of Lodz, Poland, as he prepared to begin a dentistry program.

When those texts abruptly stopped in late September, his father, Jaswinder, immediately knew something was wrong.

He called the brand-new residence built for interna- tional students studying in English, and was informed that there had been a fatal accident, and his son was involved.

“We were having bad thoughts in our hearts,” Kanhaiya said. “The world had changed for us forever.”

Over a month later, Manpreet’s family is still searching for answers. The Medical University of Lodz hasn’t contacted them, they say, and the Polish police are still investigating.

They’ve been in touch with the Canadian embassy, in Warsaw, but say they were told that they should hire an English- speaking Polish lawyer to represent their interests locally. The embassy forwarded a list of lawyers to contact.

The Foreign Affairs Department said it is in contact with local authorities and is providing consular assistance to the family, but cannot discuss specifics because of privacy concerns.

“Nobody called me to inform me about what happened, not even condolences. I had to call them,” Kanhaiya said.

Manpreet’s dreams of becoming a doctor were dashed when he wasn’t admitted to medical school in Canada, but with encouragement from his mother, the fourth-year University of Waterloo student applied for and was accepted into a dentistry program in Poland.

Manpreet’s parents flew to Lodz on Sept. 23 with their son to make sure he was properly settled and, after five days, boarded a plane for London, England, to visit family on the way home.

When they landed, they received Manpreet’s last text, sent at 1:30 a.m., just before he went to sleep.

After sending multiple messages, they grew worried and called his residence on the 30th, only to receive the fateful news. Kanhaiya said residence staff told him Manpreet had fallen out of his fourth-floor window.

“We lost our son, who was very, very intelligent. He was a great citizen, a great student. We cannot forget him throughout our life. We will never be normal again. He had so many ambitions, so many dreams. He was living his dreams, but his life was cut short by this terrible incident there,” Kanhaiya said.

The family is disturbed by the lack of communication and slow progress of the investigation. On Friday, they finally received a coroner’s report, written in Polish, that draws no conclusions about how Manpreet came to fall from the window, though it did note there were no drugs or alcohol in his system when he died.

Kanhaiya scrolls through the conversations he had with his son over the last days of his life, and has found messages that now seem curious.

“He was happy, but there was fear in his mind,” he said.

The day before his death, Manpreet sent his brother a strange message.

“Going to be careful here. Just want you to keep a screenshot of a these names ok (sic),” he wrote, adding a list of three first names and the words: “Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Just screenshot. If anything good or bad happens.”

“We don’t know whether he was targeted,” Kanhaiya said, not knowing whether police have sought out the names in Manpreet’s text. “I think that those people know something, or they are part of the problem.”

Kanhaiya says he and his son, who both wear turbans, stuck out in Lodz, where there aren’t many Sikhs.

“We were called Taliban,” he says. “We saw that with our own eyes.”

The local press has reported that Manpreet’s door was locked from the inside, according to a letter from the Medical University of Lodz distributed to the student body.

“We can assure you that the matter of Manpreet Kanhaiya’s death is treated with the utmost seriousness and respect. Our not taking a public stand on a scale expected by you was dictated only by the concern for the bereaved family,” wrote Anna Szylhabel-Godala, the university’s Director of Studies in English.

But the letter has done little to assuage Kanhaiya’s fears.

“This is the death of an innocent student. He did not even start his life. He had a clean track record,” he said.

“Now the doubts are coming in my mind.”