More than three years after a family of four from India froze to death while trying to enter the US along a remote stretch of the Canadian border in a blizzard, the alleged ringleader of an international human smuggling plot was sentenced in Minnesota on Wednesday (May 28) to 10 years in prison.
Federal prosecutors had recommended nearly 20 years for Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, and nearly 11 years for the driver who was supposed to pick them up, Steve Anthony Shand. Shand also was to be sentenced Wednesday.
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The two men appeared before US District Judge John Tunheim, who declined last month to set aside the guilty verdicts, writing, “This was not a close case,” according to
CBS.
The judge handed down the sentences at the federal courthouse in the northwestern Minnesota city of Fergus Falls, where the two men were tried and convicted on four counts apiece last November.
The smuggling operation
Prosecutors said during the trial that Patel, an Indian national who they say went by the alias “Dirty Harry,” and Shand, a US citizen from Florida, were part of a sophisticated illegal operation that brought dozens of people from India to Canada on student visas and then smuggled them across the US border.
They said the victims, Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife, Vaishaliben, who was in her mid-30s; their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi; and 3-year-old son, Dharmik, froze to death. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found their bodies just north of the border between Manitoba and Minnesota on January 19, 2022.
The family was from Dingucha, a village in the western Indian state of Gujarat, as was Harshkumar Patel. Patel is a common Indian surname, and the victims were not related to the defendant. The couple were schoolteachers, local news reports said. So many villagers have gone overseas in hopes of better lives – legally and otherwise – that many homes there stand vacant.
The harsh conditions
The father died while trying to shield Dharmik’s face from a “blistering wind” with a frozen glove, prosecutor Michael McBride wrote. Vihangi was wearing “ill-fitting boots and gloves.” Their mother “died slumped against a chain-link fence she must have thought salvation lay behind,” McBride wrote.
A nearby weather station recorded the wind chill that morning at -36 Fahrenheit (-38 Celsius).
Seven other members of their group survived the foot crossing, but only two made it to Shand’s van, which was stuck in the snow on the Minnesota side. One woman who survived had to be flown to a hospital with severe frostbite and hypothermia. Another survivor testified he had never seen snow before arriving in Canada. Their inadequate winter clothes were only what the smugglers provided, the survivor told t