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The violent story of Regent Park’s Nirmalendran brothers ends with two dead by gunfire and the youngest now serving life for senseless murder
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Evil coursed through the veins of the three Nirmalendran brothers who once called Regent Park home.
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No strangers to inflicting violence on others, two would die by violence themselves: Nixon Nirmalendran, 22, in the infamous Eaton Centre mass shooting of 2012 and a year later, Nisan, 21, in a Bleeker St. seniors’ complex as he dove for cover behind an elderly woman getting her mail.
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And now the youngest, Nirusan Nirmalendran, 29, has been sent away for life for the first-degree murder of a completely innocent man.
Asked by Superior Court Justice Anne Molloy if he had anything to say, the killer rose in his ill-fitting suit and addressed the downtown courtroom filled with grieving relatives of his victim Koshin Yusuf.
“I would like to say, Your Honour, I did not do this.”
But at the judge-alone trial, Molloy ruled otherwise
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At about 3 a.m. on Dec. 29, 2019, Nirmalendran and co-accused Oday Bazuhair ambushed Yusuf, 26, outside his family’s McCowan Rd. apartment building where he was helping to care for his autistic brother while his mom and siblings were on a two-week pilgrimage to Mecca that he’d bought for them.
The hard-working truck driver had graduated in computer science from Wuhan University where he’d also taught English; on his return, he had dreams of opening his own business and settling down with his partner.
“It’s another chapter in the senseless gun violence in this city,” Crown attorney Matt Shumka told the court.
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With guns drawn, Bazuhair and Nirmalendran approached Yusuf from behind and began shooting.
“This is a particularly craven example of a murder before these courts,” Shumka noted. “It was cowardice.”
And it seems to be motiveless.
“Your Honour is aware of the depth and the breadth of the police investigation into this matter,” the prosecutor said, “and they could never discern why.”
Even after writing more than 50 pages in her reasons for judgment, Molloy remains mystified.
“I know they did it. I know it’s first-degree murder – and I don’t know why.”
The judge fought back tears as she listened to the heartbreaking victim impact statements from a family shattered by the tragic murder of a caring, family-oriented oldest son.
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“I honestly feel like it would have hurt less if Koshin had died any other way,” wrote his sister Ilwaad Yusuf. “Anything but being shot 12 times outside of his family home on a cold and snowy December night while most of his family was away on a holiday.
“Anything but being left on the cold, hard ground to bleed to death alone.”
Nirmalendran knew better than most what it was like to lose not one, but two siblings to gun violence. And yet he obviously thought little about inflicting that same pain on Yusuf’s family.
Born in Sri Lanka, the Nirmalendran boys immigrated to Toronto when Nixon was four, Nisan, 3 and Nirusan, 1.
By 16, Nixon was involved in a robbery where his co-accused was shot by police. At 18, he was on bail for armed robbery when he was arrested for dealing crack from his River St. bedroom window. Investigators found the drugs – and a loaded 9 mm semi-automatic.
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While being held at the Don Jail, he was charged – and later acquitted – of murdering a fellow inmate.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. On Feb. 28, 2012, Christopher Husbands was beaten and stabbed more than 20 times by a group of six men that included his childhood friend Nixon and his brother Nisan.
Four months later, Nixon and Nisan, on probation for forcible entry and assault, were in the Eaton Centre food court with friends, when Husbands spotted them and opened fire. Nisan escaped but Nixon and friend Ahmed Hassan were killed and five bystanders injured, including 13-year-old Connor Stevenson.
Nisan wouldn’t outwit death a second time. On March 21, 2013, he, too, was shot and killed. No suspects have ever been arrested.
At Husbands’ sentencing hearing in 2019, the Nirmalendrans’ mother gave a victim impact statement.
“We came here and struggled to bring them up well,” she lamented. “All of them were very loving.”
Ah, the deceptions of motherhood: Two of her criminal sons are dead and now society is rid of the third bad seed as well.
“I will sleep better knowing that this will not be done to another mother,” wrote Yusuf’s mom Fiaza Adus. “We can sleep with one heart knowing that the world is better without … you in society.”
mmandel@postmedia.com
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