How Indian-origin student Akul Dhawan froze to death in US after nightclub denied entry

The student was found dead on 20 January after his body was found on the back porch of a building near the university campus.

Akul Dhawan was on a night out for drinks with friends on Saturday, 20 January, as per NDTV.

According to the preliminary investigation, police said that Dhawan met his friends at the Busey-Evans Residence Hall at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign around 9 pm on 19 January and consumed alcohol there.

He and his friends went to an event at the Canopy Club, which is located at S Goodwin Ave. in Urbana, at around 10 pm. He went to Green Street around 10:45 pm. with them, and according to authorities, security footage that was later retrieved showed him drinking more alcohol before the group headed back to Canopy Club.

Dhawan stayed outside Canopy Club between 11:25 and 11:29 pm, while the others went back in.

The club staff refused to let him in. He tried to enter the club “multiple times,” according to surveillance footage, but staff members kept denying him entry, according to the investigators.

Two separate rideshare vehicles arrived at midnight to pick up Dhawan outside Canopy Club, but he turned down both rides despite requests from venue employees and a passerby, the police said, the report said.

Around midnight, Dhawan left the bar, and his friends’ calls and texts went unanswered. At 1.23 am, he was reported missing.

As per The Kansas City Star, the police said that while driving “at a walking pace” close to the “likely path” Dhawan would have taken back to the university, an officer searched for him but was unable to locate him.

On 29 January, at around 11:08 am, a university staff member who was leaving Bevier Hall noticed Dhawan laying on the concrete steps behind 1203 W Nevada Street in Urbana and dialled the emergency number 911.

Police said that he was “dead at the time he was found.”

Late January brought frigid temperatures and severe cold, with wind chills of -20 to -30 degrees throughout Illinois and most of the Midwest.

According to weather.com, the temperature that evening dropped to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (-2.7 degrees Celsius).

The coroner’s office announced last month that there was no evidence of serious trauma in the preliminary report. “There was no foul play involved and the death is initially believed to be accidental.”

Akul’s parents, Ish and Ritu Dhawan, residents of the San Francisco Bay area in California, have filed a complaint against the university’s police department for negligence in the way the search was conducted.

The family wrote in an open letter published in The News-Gazette, “We have been asking why Akul was found 10 hours later, rather than immediately after he was reported missing, when could still be saved. The locations where he was reported missing and where he was found are less than 200 feet apart. 200 feet!”

Dhawan’s family expressed frustration that “the police never searched for our son,” as per The Kansas City Star.

Officials assert they responded promptly to the situation based on available information. After Akul reported missing, school police “searched the area where the student was last seen, the student’s residence hall and the likely path between the two locations, including the main Quad and streets.” Police also looked into nearby hospitals and made phone calls to the student.

Akul Dhawan was a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign freshman. He was enrolled in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to study robotics, as per NBC.

Despite the objections of his parents, who wanted him to attend college closer to home, he had enrolled at Illinois University.

Dhawan, who turned 18 in September last year, graduated from Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California, with a high school diploma, reported NDTV.

He attended the College of San Mateo to pursue computer science.

His untimely death occurred during his first week back at college after winter break. His family mourned the loss of a “promising young man with his entire future ahead of him”.

“We were so proud of our son for completing his semester and thriving at the university. He was a very smart kid who had his whole life before him,” the letter said, adding, “We will never be the same.”

The parents of Dhawan, who had written to The News-Gazette expressing their grief over the news, were there at the vigil on 11 February to pay tribute to their son, as per Hindustan Times.

“We have a big massive hole left in our family; we will never be the same,” they stated in the letter.

Seven young students of Indian and Indian American descent have passed away unexpectedly in 2023 due to a variety of causes, including violent crimes, alleged overdoses, and suicides.

Last week, an Indian-origin family from Kerala was found dead at their home in California with the police investigating the case as a murder-suicide. Anand Henry, a 37-year-old former Meta software engineer, is suspected of killing his wife Alice Benziger, 36, and their four-year-old twin sons before turning a gun on himself.

Student Sameer Kamath from Purdue University was found dead in Warren County on 5 February. Neel Acharya who had been missing in the US was confirmed dead by the same university authorities last month.

The most horrific death was that of Vivek Saini . A resident of Haryana, he died after he was hammered 50 times in Georgia’s Lithonia on 16 January.

White House official John Kirby denounced attacks on Indian students last week and said that there is “no excuse for violence based on race, gender, or any other factor.”

“The president and this administration have been working very, very hard to make sure we’re doing everything we can to work with state and local authorities to try to thwart and disrupt those kinds of attacks and make it clear to anybody who might consider them that they’ll be held properly accountable,” Kirby said amid a slew of attacks on Indian and Indian American students in various parts of the US.