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An Indian man was sentenced to 10 years in a US prison for his role in a human smuggling operation that led to the freezing deaths of a family of four at the US-Canada border in 2022.
More than three years after a heart-wrenching tragedy unfolded along the US-Canada border, the convicted ringleader of a human smuggling operation that led to the deaths of four members of an Indian family was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Wednesday.
Harshkumar Ramanlal Patel, an Indian national, was convicted last November along with co-conspirator Steve Anthony Shand, a US citizen, in the deaths of the Patel family, who froze to death during a blizzard while attempting to cross into the United States from Canada.
"Unimaginable death of four individuals"
Delivering the sentence at the federal courthouse in Fergus Falls, US District Judge John Tunheim said, “The crime in many respects is extraordinary because it did result in the unimaginable death of four individuals, including two children. These were deaths that were clearly avoidable.”
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Patel showed no visible emotion in court, dressed in an orange prison uniform and handcuffed. The judge noted he would likely be deported to India upon completing his sentence.
Driver Shand gets 6-and-a-half years, supervised release
Shand, the man who was supposed to pick up the migrants, was sentenced to 6-and-a-half years in prison with two years of supervised release. He had been free pending sentencing and is required to report to prison by July 1. The judge agreed to recommend he serve his sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola, Florida, to be near his family.
Federal prosecutors had sought nearly 20 years for Patel and nearly 11 years for Shand. Acting US Attorney for Minnesota Lisa Kirkpatrick said, “We should make no mistake, it was the defendant’s greed that set in motion the facts that bring us here today.”
She added, “These defendants knew it was cold. In fact, they knew it was life-threatening cold. They didn’t care. What they cared about was money, and their callous indifference to the value of human life cost a family of four their lives.”
Defense claims Patel a minor player
Patel’s attorney, Thomas Leinenweber, argued his client was a “low man on the totem pole” and requested a sentence of time served—18 months.
“He had kind of resigned himself to the fact that the sentence would be longer than he had hoped,” Leinenweber told the court. “And he’s not happy with it. But he does wish to appeal and take advantage of his rights.”
Shand’s attorney, Aaron Morrison, said in court filings that his client “was just a taxi driver who needed money to support his wife and six children.”
“Mr. Shand was on the outside of the conspiracy, he did not plan the smuggling operation, he did not have decision-making authority, and he did not reap the huge financial benefits as the real conspirators did,” Morrison wrote.
The deaths and the dangerous crossing
The victims — Jagdish Patel, 39; his wife Vaishaliben, in her mid-30s; their daughter Vihangi, 11; and son Dharmik, 3 — were found dead on January 19, 2022, just north of the border between Manitoba and Minnesota by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
The family, from Dingucha village in Gujarat, India, succumbed to severe cold during their attempt to reach the US Patel was reportedly shielding his son’s face from the wind with a frozen glove. Prosecutor Michael McBride wrote, “The father died while trying to shield Dharmik’s face from a ‘blistering wind’ with a frozen glove... Their mother died slumped against a chain-link fence she must have thought salvation lay behind.”
A nearby weather station recorded a wind chill of -36°F (-38°C) that day.
Seven others survived — barely
Seven other Indian nationals made the crossing attempt with the Patel family. Two reached Shand’s van, which was stuck in snow on the Minnesota side. One woman was airlifted to hospital with severe frostbite and hypothermia. Another man testified he had never seen snow before arriving in Canada.
Prosecutors said Patel, who went by the alias “Dirty Harry,” helped smuggle dozens of Indian nationals to Canada using student visas, and then attempted to move them into the US Shand, they argued, was tasked with picking them up from the snowy border region.
A warning from border officials
Michael Hanson, acting chief patrol agent for the Grand Forks sector of US Customs and Border Protection, which covers Minnesota and North Dakota, said human smuggling cases in the region have remained steady.
“We hope that this is a strong message, and especially during the inclement months,” Hanson said. “You know, there very well could have been 11 deaths associated with this event.”
