NYPD officers responded around 10 p.m. Friday to a shooting on Richmond Street in Brooklyn, where they found 27-year-old Gurdeep Singh with a gunshot wound to the chest. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital, cutting short a life built on years of grueling work as a delivery driver far from his family in Punjab.
Singh lived in Queens while working as a delivery partner in New York City, according to The New Indian Express. Street surveillance video recovered by local media shows two individuals in a physical altercation moments before a flash of gunfire, after which Singh collapsed and the assailant fled in a motor vehicle. Police searched the surrounding neighborhood for evidence through Saturday morning, and per a report cited by NDTV, the shooting was suspected to be the result of an attempted robbery. Local police in New York City said they would release more details as the investigation continues.
NDTV, drawing on family accounts, reports that Singh went to the United States 13 years ago and had taken out a loan to make the journey, hoping to earn a livelihood and secure a better future for his parents back in India. His father, Pyara Lal, told the outlet that his son faced numerous hardships in the United States and worked day and night to provide a better life for the family. Singh is survived by his father and a brother.
A Debt-Fueled Journey Cut Short
The Indian Express offers a starker accounting of that sacrifice: Singh's family borrowed roughly 30 lakh rupees, about $36,000, to send him to the United States in 2017 via an irregular migratory route known as “dunki,” leaving his daily-wage family in Kapurthala mired in debt. The family owns no agricultural land and survives on daily wage labor, according to the same report. Singh had not visited his family in India for nine years before his death.
According to NDTV, Singh was associated with both Jabowal and Begowal villages in Punjab. His family was notified of the shooting through his U.S.-based cousin Sahil, who was alerted by pizza company officials, the Indian Express reports. That notification set off a formal petition to the Indian government for help repatriating his body, with the family also requesting that authorities move to bring him home. Singh's relatives have asked U.S. authorities to ensure the swift arrest of the person responsible and to seek the strictest possible punishment.
Diaspora Group Demands Answers
The North American Punjabi Association has called on federal and municipal authorities to establish the exact motive behind the killing, warning against normalizing repeated violence against community members, according to ThePrint. The group pointed to recent extortion threats targeting the Punjabi and Sikh diaspora in the U.S. and noted federal crackdowns on diaspora extortion networks in California earlier this year. Whether Singh's death was a random robbery attempt or tied to broader threats against the community remains unresolved, and the dossier record does not resolve which explanation is accurate.
A Dangerous Job Across the City
Singh's death adds to a grim pattern documented among New York City's delivery workforce. A 2024 CUNY study analyzing city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection data found that 20.8% of NYC food delivery gig workers reported being assaulted on the job, with full-time couriers facing a 36% higher risk of assault than part-timers. More than two-thirds of surveyed gig workers said delivery work was their primary income source.
Reporting from Documented, based on Workers Justice Project records, found that 10 immigrant delivery workers died on New York City streets in 2024, continuing an upward trend from seven deaths in 2023 and five in 2022, though fatalities during the pandemic peak of 2021 reached 14. New York City created a first-in-the-nation minimum wage rule for app delivery workers under Local Law 115 of 2021, raising hourly pay to $19.96 by April 2025, according to AEE Law — but the rule does not require app companies to supply physical safety gear or security measures, and major delivery apps unsuccessfully sued to block the pay mandate.
The danger has surfaced repeatedly in the region this year. In June, a 28-year-old pizza delivery driver in North Philadelphia was shot and killed after being lured to a vacant home via a fraudulent food order placed as an attempted robbery trap, as Hoodline previously reported in its coverage of a Northern Liberties shooting. And in July, a 29-year-old pizza delivery driver in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, survived after being slashed and robbed of cash and pizza by three assailants during a late-night drop-off, a case Hoodline detailed in its report on the East Flatbush pizza slashing.
For now, Singh's family in Punjab is left waiting — for word from NYPD investigators on the search for the gunman, and for the Indian government's help in bringing his body home for burial near the villages he left behind more than a decade ago.
