Kriss Donald was born in Glasgow on 2 July 1988. He attended local schools in Pollokshields, a neighbourhood on the city's south side known for its handsome sandstone tenements and a long-settled, mixed community. On the evening of 15 March 2004, he was walking with a friend when a car carrying members of a local gang stopped and the men inside seized him. He was taken because he was white. He had no involvement in any rivalry, no association with anyone connected to the gang. He was a child on a familiar street and they took him because of what he looked like. The friend who was with him watched him being bundled into the car. He told the police what had happened.

What happened in the hours that followed is documented by court evidence and by the convictions of those responsible. Kriss was driven north out of Glasgow and across central Scotland, then back to the city, hundreds of miles in total. He was returned to a footpath by the River Clyde near where he was taken. There he was stabbed repeatedly and, while still alive, set on fire. He died of his injuries. The pathologists' findings, presented at the second trial, made clear that he had been conscious through much of what was done to him. He was fifteen, a schoolboy with friends and a family, and the people who killed him chose him for the colour of his skin. The Scottish High Court in Edinburgh would, in November 2006, formally describe the murder as racially motivated.

Two of those involved were convicted in late 2004. Three others - Imran Shahid, Zeeshan Shahid, and Mohammed Faisal Mushtaq - fled to Pakistan. Their extradition required the personal intervention of Mohammed Sarwar, then the Labour MP for Glasgow Central and the first Muslim MP elected in the United Kingdom. Sarwar travelled to Pakistan, used his connections and his standing, and helped negotiate what was the first extradition from Pakistan to the UK for a non-terror offence. The three men arrived in Scotland on 5 October 2005 and were charged the next day. Their trial opened on 2 October 2006. On 8 November 2006, a jury at the High Court in Edinburgh convicted all three of the racially motivated abduction and murder of Kriss Donald.

The BBC waited until the eighteenth day of the trial to mention it on its main bulletins. Peter Horrocks of the BBC later apologised. The corporation's then-Head of Newsgathering, Fran Unsworth, conceded the failure but argued it was a product of what she called Scottish blindness rather than race. Peter Fahy, the police spokesman on race issues, was more direct: it was a fact, he said, that murder victims who were young white men were harder to get the media interested in. The columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown drew a comparison with the case of Stephen Lawrence, asking whether Kriss Donald's killers were less evil and arguing that treating some victims as more worthy of condemnation than others was unforgivable. The journalist Mark Easton wrote that the case forced society to redefine racism away from a formula that allowed only ethnic minorities to be its victims.

A memorial plaque sits on a bench beside the River Clyde, near where he died. Another is fixed to a public fence in Pollokshields, close to the spot where he was taken. In July 2018, family and friends gathered there to mark what would have been his thirtieth birthday. The Glasgow band Glasvegas wrote a song for him, Flowers & Football Tops, inspired by what they knew the loss would mean for his parents. When the band won the Philip Hall Radar NME Award in 2008, they dedicated it to his memory. In 2021 a petition was launched to name a Glasgow bridge after him. The case has continued to be cited in debates about racially motivated violence in Britain. Behind the policy arguments is a schoolboy from Pollokshields who never came home, and a family who have spent more than two decades carrying that.