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A Tracy man pleaded guilty last week to a murder-for-hire scheme, leaving a Dublin man as the only defendant in the case who hasn’t accepted a plea deal with federal prosecutors to date.
Shaminderjit Singh Sandhu, 51, pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to use interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder for hire, Acting U.S. Attorney Kimberly Sanchez for the Eastern District of California said in a statement.
According to court documents, Sandhu and Manteca resident Jagninder Singh Boparai, 49, conspired to murder “Victim 2”, and that Dublin resident Ramesh Kumar Birla, Jr., 47, allegedly helped.
In February 2023, all three repeatedly met with a person they thought was a hitman at a Starbucks in Manteca. In reality, the “hitman” was a confidential informant working with the FBI.
Boparai told the fake hitman that the first job involved the assault of “Victim 1,” offered him $6,000, and once he proved trustworthy at that task, he would be given another job, prosecutors said. Boparai gave the hitman a $1,000 deposit as payment. The informant then came back with a staged photo of Victim 1 lying on the ground covered in bruises, dirt and blood. Once Boparai saw that, he told the informant that he had two more jobs for him, one robbing a business and the other making someone “disappear.”
This time a $10,000 down payment was paid to the informant for the murder of Victim 2. Sandhu gave the informant the address and Birla allegedly helped locate Victim 2’s picture on social media.
According to prosecutors, on March 24, 2023, Sandhu and Birla met with the confidential informant in a parking lot in Manteca. Sandhu and Birla claimed that Boparai was out of town, but Boparai was observed by surveillance remaining in a car in the same parking lot. Sandhu and Birla allegedly instructed the confidential informant to kill Victim 2 and take Victim 2’s remains to Mexico in a suitcase.
All three defendants were arrested on March 31, 2023, and are currently in federal custody. Sandhu is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 13 and is facing up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Boparai pleaded guilty for his role in the crime in January and is scheduled to be sentenced on Aug. 7. He faces the same penalties as Sandhu.
Birla is scheduled for a further status conference on Oct. 23. If convicted, he faces the same penalties as Sandhu and Boparai.
— Story by Katy St. Clair, Bay City News Service
