A man declared a dangerous offender after being found guilty of sex crimes against children in Surrey had twice been deported to Canada from the U.S., where he had been in jail on other charges.
Jatin Patel, now 44, killed a transexual prostitute the day after he arrived in Canada, on his second deportation, in 2003.
Justice Kenneth Ball sentenced him on March 7 to an indeterminate prison term, meaning his sentence has no expiry date, following an eight-day trial after which a jury in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster found Patel guilty of two counts of sexual assault and two counts of sexually touching a child under age 16, for crimes committed in Surrey in January and March of 2015.
“Mr. Patel exhibited deceitful and manipulative conduct in relation to the young girls, as well as his supervisors,” Ball noted at the sentencing.
There is a publication ban on information that could identity the victim, in this case a 13-year-old girl whom he’d met on Facebook.
Patel met her and her friend, another 13-year-old girl, at Surrey’s Linda Vista motel, where he supplied them with crystal methamphetamine and tried to have sex with the victim before she masturbated him.
The court heard the victim was molested a second time after Patel snuck her and her friend into his room at a recovery house on 140th Street in Surrey, where they also smoked crystal meth.
Patel was born in Toronto in 1974 and lived in Canada for a few years after his family moved to Statesboro, Georgia to start a business buying, fixing, selling and running motels. When he was 10, his dad was shot dead by an employee during a fight over money. Patel first ran into trouble with the law for forging signatures on cheques from his mom and motel guests, and was incarcerated in Grade 12. Two-and-a-half years into a five-year sentence he tried to escape from jail and was sentenced to five more years. After serving another two-and-a half-years he was deported to Canada but lied his way back into the U.S. After being found out he was charged under U.S. immigration laws and sentenced to five years in prison in that country.
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Patel was deported to Canada, for the second time, on May 27, 2003. He had been in jail in the U.S., was released from Vancouver Airport and booked into a Travelodge motel in North Vancouver. He hired a prostitute, discovered she was transexual and in a fit of anger killed her by breaking her esophagus. “He then placed her naked body in a closet in his room, hidden there by linen and clothing,” Ball noted. Patel then met a woman in the hotel lobby, gave her $100 to buy drugs and they went up to his room for sex, with the victim’s body still in the room. Patel later wrapped the victim’s body in plastic garbage bags and mattress inside a shopping cart and left it behind a store near the hotel. ID’d by the logo on the motel mattress, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to nine years in prison.
In November 2011 he got another year in jail and three years probation for attempted robbery while on bail and at a halfway house. He was subsequently convicted of breaching court orders three times and in 2015 was convicted of sexually touching a 13-year-old Surrey girl while she was shopping with her mom in a Surrey grocery store.
The Judge noted Patel has “filtered through” 31 different treatment centres or programs for drug abuse. Ball reminded him, after declaring him a dangerous offender, that “an indeterminate sentence is not a perpetual sentence” and that he will be eligible for periodic reviews of his parole eligibility.
“Ultimately, your success at those reviews is in your hands,” Ball told him. “I sincerely hope that you make use of the resources available to you during your detention, and that you succeed to conquer your addictions and to turn your life around.”
tom.zytaruk@surreynowleader.com
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