Awaiting news conference @FBImostWanted @AACOpd @FBIbaltimore #WTOP pic.twitter.com/HLe9cakKpK
— Kristi King (@kingWTOP) April 18, 2017
"100K reward is a LOT of $$" sz Chief Timothy Altomare @AACOpd on new @FBImostWanted @FBIbaltimore #WTOP pic.twitter.com/JX5h9uxHqD
— Kristi King (@kingWTOP) April 18, 2017
WASHINGTON — An Anne Arundel County man who stabbed his wife to death in the doughnut shop where they worked joins another Maryland man on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.
Bhadreshkumar C. Patel, 26, is charged with first- and second-degree murder for the 2015 killing of his wife Palak Patel. Court documents said that 21-year-old Palak Patel was struck in the face with a large kitchen knife at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Arundel Mills Boulevard.
Several customers were still in the restaurant as Palak Patel was stabbed multiple times in a backroom of the business, officials said.
The brutal nature of the crime and the possibility that someone outside the United States knows where Patel is contributed to the decision to add him to the list, said Gordon Johnson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office.
“The violence in this case was stark. It was heart-wrenching and it was a shock to our collective conscience on the police department,” said Police Chief Tim Altomare.
Investigators don’t believe that Patel, who is a native of India, has left the country. However investigators believe that someone is knowingly helping Patel or is helping him and interacting with him while remaining in the dark about the crimes he’s charged with, Altomare said.
Altomare hopes the international notoriety of being named one of the most wanted fugitives in the United States will help convince anyone with information about Patel to come forward — whether they are here or abroad, he said.
Patel has been not seen or heard of since the morning after Palak Patel’s death when he took a cab from a New Jersey hotel to Newark Penn Station.
The Patels’ visas expired about a month before the deadly stabbing. And investigators believe that Palak Patel wanted to return to the couple’s native India, but her husband was against the idea.
“Palak had her whole life ahead of her,” Johnson said. “(She) was pursuing a master’s degree in commerce. Mr. Patel brutally took her life, her ambitions and her dreams.”
Patel also faces a federal charge of fleeing to avoid prosecution.
He joins William Bradford Bishop on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” Bishop, who was named as a wanted fugitive in 2014, is charged with 10 counts of murder for the 1976 deaths of his mother, wife and three sons. Police believe Bishop killed his family in Bethesda and then transported their bodies to North Carolina.
