Indian-origin petrol station owner killed in robbery on daughter's b'day
Darpan News Desk IANS, 07 Dec, 2021 12:31 PM
New York, Dec 7 (IANS) The Indian-origin owner of a petrol station in the US state of Georgia was killed on his daughter's birthday in a brazen daylight robbery in front of a bank that shares a building with a police station.
Amit Patel, 45, was gunned down at around 10 a.m. on Monday in Columbus during an apparent robbery as he was making a deposit at the bank, TV station WTVM reported quoting the county coroner.
His partner Vinnie Patel told the TV station that after depositing the weekend sales receipt from his petrol station at the bank he was planning to celebrate his three-year-old daughter's birthday.
"She will never forget what happened to her father on her birthday," he said.
Amit Patel is survived by his wife and daughter, according to him.
Vinnie Patel told the Ledger-Enquirer newspaper that the shooter took the money that Amit Patel was going to deposit.
He told the publication that Amit Patel was "super nice guy" who ran an efficient operation and "did whatever he could for his employees.
Columbus Mayor Skip Henderson told WRBL TV that "every law enforcement is absolutely committed to make a quick arrest" in the case.
The station said that Amit Patel's killing was the 65th homicide this year in Columbus, which has a population of 206,922 and is Georgia state's second biggest city.
The 65 homicides are a big jump from the 46 recorded in 2020, which according to WTVM was itself a record.
The US has seen an upsurge in homicides in recent years recording a nearly 30 per cent jump to 21,570 in 2020 from the 16,669 recorded in 2019, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The number of homicides was continuing to rise according to preliminary data.
The spike in murders coincides with a campaign by some Democrats and other leftists to cut the police budgets as well as to reduce the number of law enforcement personnel or scrap police departments in the wake of the protests over the killing of an African-American at the hands of police in Minneapolis last year.
However, rise in crime has brought a backlash with candidates like former New York police captain Eric Adams who promise to be tough on crimes winning elections last month and the referendum in Minneapolis to abolish the police department losing.
Cricketer Harbhajan Singh has tweeted about a Korean Netflix show named "My Secret Terrius", which had seemingly predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 2018 in one of its early episodes.
As India wages a war against the deadly coronavirus pandemic, an Indian-born entrepreneur, Shamsheer Vayalil, has come forward to offer his support towards setting up a hospital exclusively for the treatment of Covid-19 patients.
Authorities in Dubai taking steps to help stranded passengers, including 22 Indians, who were in transit at the airport here when their home countries suddenly stopped inbound flights due to the coronavirus pandemic, it was reported on Friday.
A team from the University of South Australia (UniSA), led by an Indian-origin researcher, have begun developing a drone to monitor patients with infectious respiratory conditions including the novel coronavirus.
The California-based Sikh Coalition has prepared COVID-19 guidelines in Punjabi to enable the about 500,000 Sikhs living in America to better understand the pandemic, a media report said.
Displaying uncharacteristic political solidarity, the US Congress has voted the largest ever economic stimulus package worth about $2 trillion to rescue the nation from the clutches of the Covid-19 pandemic.
