Toronto police have identified Sukhvir Deo as the victim of Tuesday’s shooting at Yonge and Eglinton.
Toronto police say that the man killed Tuesday in a brazen daylight shooting was 35-year-old Sukhvir Deo.
Although known to Toronto police, Mr. Deo had no contact with the local force before he was shot and killed just steps away from the busy Yonge and Eglinton intersection, homicide Detective Sergeant Joyce Schertzer said Thursday.
Police received a call at 2:50 p.m. Tuesday about multiple gunshots in an alleyway off Cowbell Lane behind a condominium complex. They found Mr. Deo in the driver's seat of a white Range Rover, where he had been shot at close range. Paramedics pronounced Mr. Deo dead at the scene.
Two suspects wearing green and orange construction vests respectively were seen fleeing the scene. Police released closed-circuit television photos of a black Honda Civic, which was made between 2000 and 2005 and had distinctive rims, Det. Sgt. Schertzer said.
The shooting rattled residents of the normally quiet midtown neighbourhood.
Police declined to comment about media reports alleging that Mr. Deo had gang affiliations in the Vancouver area. Mr. Deo was visiting Toronto at the time of the shooting, police said.
In a statement read by police, Mr. Deo's family said they were "shattered" by his death. Allegations that have surfaced about Mr. Deo's past are untrue, the family said.
"To his family, he was a loving son, a loving brother and a loving husband and father of two very young children," the statement read.
Mr. Deo drew public attention in late May when he was ejected from a Toronto Raptors game for heckling the referees.
He is the city's 33rd homicide victim of 2016 and the latest casualty in a spate of local gun violence that has killed 21 people this year, three times the number killed in the same period of 2015.