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Brother of suspect held in Sikh family’s murder in US also arrested
The family was kidnapped at gunpoint - an abduction recorded on surveillance video - from their trucking business Monday morning in Merced, authorities said
The brother of a man arrested for allegedly abducting and killing four members of an Indian-origin Sikh family in California earlier this week has also been arrested for being an accessory to the crime, local media reported citing authorities.
Local authorities said that Alberti Salgado, the brother of Jesus Manuel Salgado, was arrested on Thursday night on preliminary charges of criminal conspiracy, accessory, and destroying evidence in connection with the case, CNN quoted Merced County sheriff’s spokesperson Alexandra Britton as saying.
Earlier, Jesus Manuel Salgado, the suspect in the kidnapping and murder, was arrested late Thursday. Salgado, 48, accused of kidnapping and killing 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her parents Jasleen Kaur, 27, and Jasdeep Singh, 36, and her uncle Amandeep Singh, 39, was booked into the Merced County Jail. The family hailed from Harsi Pind in Hoshiarpur, Punjab.
After a search for the deceased, who had been reported missing on Monday, authorities recovered their bodies from a farm area on Wednesday. A farmworker alerted police to the bodies lying in an orchard in central California’s Merced County.
The bodies of the family, which originally hail from Punjab in India, were discovered lying close to each other by the farm worker, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke, adding that “there’s a special place in hell” for the perpetrator.
The family was kidnapped at gunpoint - an abduction recorded on surveillance video - from their trucking business Monday morning in Merced, authorities said.
Meanwhile, the suspect Jesus Manuel Salgado attempted suicide sometime before he was taken into custody, and he has been receiving medical attention.
Later, in the police investigation, it was revealed that Jesus Salgado was a former employee who had a longstanding dispute with the family that “got pretty nasty” ABC30 reported.
‘American dream gone wrong’
“This is the story of our American dream gone wrong,” said Jaspreet Kaur, the grieving wife of Amandeep Singh.
Jaspreet, who has organised a GoFundMe fundraiser page, said that her husband and his brother had been in the United States for 18 years and supported not only their families in California but also their elderly parents back in India.
“This is the story of our shared American dream gone wrong. Our loving family was violently taken away from us on October 3rd,” the family’s gofundme page said.
The couple had a 9-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son.
