U.S. attorneys have filed sentencing submissions for two men convicted after a family froze to death while trying to walk across the Canada-U.S. border in Manitoba.
A Minnesota jury found Steve Shand and Harshkumar Patel guilty of human-smuggling charges after the parents and two children from India were found in the snow in January 2022.
The attorneys say in court documents that Patel is not remorseful and they’re requesting he be sentenced to a little more than 19 years in prison.
They also say Shand should be handed 10 years for conspiring with Patel to smuggle migrants into the United States at least five times through brutal winter conditions.
Shand’s lawyer, Aaron Morrison, says in a document that proposed sentence is “unduly punitive” and he’s requesting a little more than two years in prison.
A defence lawyer did not provide a document outlining a recommendation for Patel.
They were convicted last November in the January 2022 deaths of the Patel family (who were not related to Harshkumar Patel).
The frozen bodies of Jagdish Patel, 39, his wife, Vaishali, 37, their 11-year-old daughter, Vihangi, and their three-year-old son, Dharmik, were found in a snow-drifted Manitoba field just 12 metres from the U.S. border later on the morning of Jan. 19, 2022.
The temperature that day was –23 C, but the wind chill made it feel like the –35 to –38 range.
Shand was arrested near the border around the same time with other Indian nationals in the van he was driving. Harshkumar Patel was arrested in Chicago in February 2024 on charges of co-ordinating the smuggling and hiring Shand.
The men are set to be sentenced May 28.
Last month, a U.S. district judge rejected requests for new trials for the men, ruling there was sufficient evidence for the jury to find them guilty on all four counts.
